Mwah

Vocal mics can be extremely personal thing, especially if you’re the one recording and mixing your own voice. Personally, I’ve been through a lot of great cheap-ish and mid-price-ish mics, tube and solid state, including Mojave MA300, AKG C414 (don’t remember the variation), Antelope Audio Edge Solo, and Austrian Audio OC18. I have a soft-ish baritone voice that’s not an easy one to record, at least not with my (admittedly less than professional) recording/mixing skills. I’ve also gone through a few mic preamps: RME Fireface 800, GAP PRE-73, Focusrite ISA One being the lastest I’ve tried. Anyway, last summer I sort of impulse bought an used sE Electronics SE2200T mic – a discontinued tube variation of a more common solid state model – and with my current interface/preamp (SSL 12) seems to be a perfect combination for my voice. ( I did switch the original ECC83/12AX7 tube for a JJ Electronics ECC803, but the difference that may made is probably pretty minimal.) There’s much less need for eq’ing, even though good dose of compression during mixing is still a good idea. A more proficient engineer probably would have gotten great and even better results with any of the hardware I used to have, and an important part of the good results may well be me getting better with recording and mixing. So, my advice here (if you can call this that) is that you may be needing time to test several mic/preamp combinations before you find the ”golden one” for your particular voice and preferences. If you can get loaners from friends/shops/studios to try, it’ll be much cheaper than buying and re-selling stuff. Good luck!

There are lot of great LCD mics that might fit your budget. Warm Audio makes several re-makes of classics. Rødes are pretty good, too, as are even the cheaper models from several other companies. My personal favourite for my voice at the moment is Austrian Audio OC18, which is a sort of remake of a vintage AKG C414. Note the word ”for my voice”.* The problem is, we people have different voices and are looking for a mic that emphasize different aspects of our personal voices, and those aspects differ from person to person, from musical style to another, for taste to taste. And, of course, where you are recording – the avoustics – counts, too, as does the mic preamp you’re using. So many variables, so many mic models, so little time... * Mine happens to be a pretty soft baritone. And I’m using a Focusrite ISA One preamp.

Shimmer Shake Strike? A Kontakt library, but works with the free Player. https://insessionaudio.com/products/shimmer-shake-strike/

You may be right, but at least according to my memory, several later versions of Sonar did work like CbB.

(That’s our five apartment house back there, behind the pergola and the glasshouse.)

Northeastern Helsinki, Finland.

Me, I took the Cubase Pro crossgrade offer, but found out I prefer to do my midi editing with Cakewalk (after starting with the Pro audio back in the mid-nineties). So, at the moment, my workflow goes usually like this: 1. Scetch the song stucture and chord secquence with Band in a Box. Export to midi (without the RealTracks audio). 2. Import midi to Cakewalk. Edit the hell out of midi tracks, probably replace the drums with midi loops, use Kontakt sounds and a couple of soft synths for ”keyboards”. Export midi to .wav, all files starting from 00:00:00. 3. Import audio to Cubase and edit markers and tempo from a Cakewalk screenshot. Add bass, guitars, vocals. Mix, remix. 4. Import the mix .wav file to Adobe Audition for editing the starts and ends and to export to 44.1 kHz/16bit formats when necessary. Yes, I know, I could probably do everything I want with either Cakewalk or Cubase (or use the multitrack features of Audition instead of Cubase) after a brief studying of manuals, but this works for me...