Shure: 520DX ?Green Bullet? mic

The Green Bullet, as you likely know, is designed as a mic for harmonica players. You plug it into a guitar amp, and there's your classic blues harp sound. I don't play harmonica or even know anyone who does, but I bought one anyway because I had a feeling it'd be just the thing for some interesting vocal sounds. And sure enough, it is. Its frequency response is 100 Hz to 5 kHz, so we are talking nothing but midrange goodness here. As it's omnidirectional, you can get right up on it without any proximity effect. So my singer did in fact get right up on it, and we hit record. As I was looking for some semblance of a clean sound, I wasn't running it into an amp but just straight into an instrument input on my preamp. We both loved the sound immediately. Very unique and intimate sounding. It distorts in a most pleasant fashion. Actually it doesn't really distort, just gets kinda "furry." Or perhaps "fuzzy." Take your pick. We recorded a half dozen takes of one vocal with it, and when we played them all back together the resultant sound could

only be described as "mellotron-esque." Splendid! Having enjoyed it so much on vocals, I figured it would probably be good fun on drums, and it didn't disappoint one bit. I put it up about a foot in front of the snare, next to the rack tom, and sure enough, it was one of the more entertaining drum sounds I've gotten in awhile. "Lo-fi," sure, but still very clear and defined, and as it's an omni, it did a good job of picking up the whole kit and some of the room as well. I liked the sound so much I ended up using just the Bullet mic and a kick mic for the better part of the drum sound on two songs. With both the vox and drums, it was really cool to get a "messed up" sound at the mic, rather than using EQ or whatever later on. One caveat with drums if you're tracking to digital: it is seriously peaky. I don't mean frequency-response-wise necessarily, I mean the transients on the snare were insane. Which, as the drummer, I really like. But as the (ahem) producer... it was tough to fit it into the mix at first because the snare was either sticking out way too much, or inaudible except for the attack. I tried squashing it, but quickly realized that the transient spike was actually a big part of what I liked about the sound, so I ended up tucking a squashed version underneath the uncompressed track, and this did the trick nicely.

I paid $120 for the Green Bullet at the Audio Megalomart. Go get one. They're fun. ($186.44 MSRP with volume control and attached cable; www.shure.com)