AEA - KU5A

My KU5A is also my workhorse. Vocals, acoustic guitars, piano, melodica. It sounds great.

DrAlienSmith Alien8, my favorite kick mic ever. Not exactly obscure, but I rarely see AEA KU5A, which is sooo good for guitar amps and vocals.

I'm quite a fan of the AEA ku5a, you should try it!

You should give the AEA ku5a a try. It's a supercardiod ribbon microphone that has more top end than classic ribbon mics but still a lot smoother than most condensers. I love mine!

I couldn't listen to your demos without opening an Instagram account, which I don't want to do. I found someone with your name on YouTube, but he's in New Jersey. If that's you, stop cupping the mic and don't "eat" it. That makes its frequency response wonky and causes it to distort. Any lyric worth singing needs to be understandable or what's the point? AEA's KU5 was their attempt to make a ribbon mic that could be used in for live tracking without the severe leakage problems of a conventional bi-directional ribbon design. Like most AEA mics, it was inspired by a vintage RCA mic, the BK-5A unidirection ribbon microphone, now scarce as hen's teeth. The new AEA doesn't sound the same but fills much the same functional role: a highly directional mic with a warm, rolled-off sound -- the opposite of a Sennheiser 441, to choose another famous dynamic stage microphone with a tight pattern. If one doesn't work tight pickup situation, the other one might. One rarely sees either microphone on modern stages; today we have much more rugged super-cardioid stage mics that sound good and cost a whole lot less. Dynamic ribbons are "character" microphones. The more colored a microphone is, the more apt it is to be either wonderful or horrible on any particular vocalist. If you fill a studio mic locker with mics like that, you need to own a large number of different ones and keep swapping them until you find the one that works in each situation. I know people who have dozens and dozens of weird microphones like that, many bought in junk stores. They seldom pay more than $200-300 for a microphone, but it adds up. They could have saved all those Ben Franklin bills and just bought U87! Personally, I haven't time to sort through all that detritus when I need to get a vocal session going. I'll put up three mics -- one from each of the different categories I listed above -- and pick the one that works best, then get on with tracking. My advice is to find out what a condenser mic can reveal about your voice. I'll be honest: if you've only used dynamic mics, you might not like what you hear at first. It can be scary hearing that much detail and you'll probably end up wanting to practice more to improve your vocal delivery. In the end, that only works to your benefit.

AEA ku5a has got to be on the top of the list for me. One of my workhorses mics at the moment. The AEA N22 also sounds great and gets a ton of use at my studio.