LEWITT Backstage

[LEWITT] Over the past few years, Aaron’s had the opportunity to use many different microphones, and you’ve also gone and deliberately tested a bunch of microphones on his voice. Can you tell us which microphone you came up with for him?

[Jared Miller] He’d long been on a Sennheiser 935, and though he liked the sound he heard on the monitors, it didn’t work for the front of house engineer. So a year ago, we started experimenting and went through half a dozen different microphones, and the last one we tried was the LEWITT MTP 940 CM. We put it up there for him, and he just immediately loved it. That’s what we’ve been using ever since, and it’s been working very well for us. The MTP 940 CM packs the features of a large-diaphragm condenser microphone into a handheld enclosure and has three polar patterns: cardioid, supercardioid and wide cardioid. We’re using the supercardioid pattern. Aaron sometimes sings a little bit softer, and having that focused direction on his voice helps him to cut through the front of house, since Aaron also sometimes gets off the mic a little bit and likes to sing to the side of it. So we tried out the supercardioid, expecting that we’d maybe have to open it up to the wide cardioid, but we never needed to. Aaron loves the sound of it all around on the supercardioid pattern. It helps cut down on stage volume with everything bleeding in from the sides, and it gives us a really tight, intimate sound for Aaron’s voice.

As Aaron’s monitor engineer, do you hear a difference in your monitoring of what Aaron hears?

[Jared Miller] I do! Before we began using the MTP 940 CM handheld condenser mic, I’d always had to do some pretty heavy EQing on the vocal mic to get it where Aaron wanted it sound-wise: present for him without sounding thin. That was always a struggle until we got the MTP 940 CM. With this mic, I found that I could pretty much turn off my EQ, since it already sounded how I’d been trying to get the other mics to sound.

[LEWITT] Has the front of house engineer remarked about how the microphone sounds in his world?

[Jared Miller] He has less bleed from the instruments, so he’s able to get the vocals up over the instruments in the mix a lot better. At first, he was really surprised by all the mid-range he was able to use with the MTP 940 CM that he hadn’t been able to use before. So basically, it was the balanced sound and the clarity we got without sounding harsh that really stood out.