- Surely, you can't be serious.
I am serious.
And don't call me surely.
(ambient electronic music)
All bad "Airplane" jokes aside,
I decided to cave in to the pressure.
Many of you have been asking me for my views,
my thoughts on the Shure SM7B
that I have in my hands here,
in fact, I'm gonna unpack it now
and take a look at what is inside the box.
It's a legendary vocal microphone,
so many YouTubers use this microphone.
I see it all over the place.
Inside, of course you get all the usual manuals,
nice Shure sticker, all included.
Some Velcro straps in case you wanna cable manage
and the legendary, cardioid dynamic vocal microphone here.
Wrapped in a little bit of plastic.
Let's open it up.
This right here is what a lot of YouTubers
and podcasters are using to sound great.
It's a vocal cardioid dynamic microphone.
It's a bit of a unique thing in the microphone world
so I wanted to plug it in and test it out
and see exact how it sounds for me.
This is me right up on the AKG C414 XLII
taking full advantage of the proximity effect.
I'm gonna get really close,
this is taking full advantage of the proximity effect.
How do I sound when I'm up
on top of the Shure SM7B?
This is me a little bit further away,
doing commentary as I would do on YouTube
to test how exactly the the AKG C414 XLII
sounds at a reasonable distance away.
And then I'm gonna lean away a little bit
and talk as I would on a YouTube video
and see exactly how this sounds
with no processing on the microphone.
A question that I get asked a lot
about the Shure SM7B is can I use it
with a DBX 286s instead of the Cloudlifter
that you buy to increase the gain?
Because it's quite a quiet microphone as it comes,
it doesn't have phantom power,
it's not a condenser.
And the answer is yes, and in fact, I'd recommend it.
It's better than spending your money on a Cloudlifter,
you can spend the same money or less
on a DBX 286s and get some more features.
I'll show you my best settings for the DBX 286s
and the Shure SM7B.
And now I'll hop over to the DBX 286s,
I'll show you the best settings I found
for the Shure SM7B and how to set it up yourself.
First of all the most important thing
is to look at this gain dial.
It needs to be really high.
You can get up to 60 dB of gain on the DBX 286s
and it's just two clicks away from that.
And of course, it's just under the yellow 0 dB level
and we're certainly not anywhere near the clip,
which is good.
So we're getting a good level
just with the DBX 286s, no Cloudlifter required
for this microphone at all.
48-volt phantom power should be off
unlike a condenser microphone
where it would be illuminated and yellow.
It's dynamic so it doesn't require any extra power.
High pass filter, I will leave off.
I'll switch that on though,
to show you the difference.
Just cuts off a little bit of the low end
from the microphone.
Nothing too noticeable there.
Now I'm going to set all these dials down to neutral
and switch off process bypass
so that we can set this up
with some really sweet settings.
Okay. Process bypass off.
Turn the gain up a little bit,
here we go.
Now you can hear me turning the gain up
at the far end, this is the output gain
so now you can hear me at a similar level
to how you were hearing me just earlier.
So let's start off with the compressor.
And first of all, we'll switch up drive
and then you can really hear it kicking in.
Whoa, that's distortion.
So we're gonna probably need to turn down
as we turn the drive up.
Here we go, testing, testing, one two three.
And now you can see just 3 dB of drive is happening there.
Let's turn the density up a little bit more
and that's gonna give us some nice,
real full compression on the mic.
And about there is decent for a good sound.
You'll see my levels have boosted somewhat quite a bit,
so gonna turn the output gain down just a little bit.
Now we'll look at the de-esser
and in order to set this up
I'm gonna put the threshold up really high
and then I'm gonna sss into the mic
and find where my Ss are,
although this is not a very sibilant mic,
de-essing can help. (hisses)
There we go and at roundabout there is good for me
but really this mic doesn't need much de-esser at all,
I'm gonna leave it about there.
Low frequency, we can boost up the bass
so turning this up makes me sound like a radio announcer.
Listen to that with a big boomy bass there
especially when I'm really close to the microphone.
That's way too much so let's back it back off
and pop it down around three, I think is enough
seeing as the Shure SM7B already has
quite a bit of natural bass.
High frequency, increasing the clarity
in the high end, the crispness of my voice, and wow
as I push that up, that really does work.
So let's, again, back this down a little bit
and I think we can afford to sit at about three.
This is a very neutral, easy sounding microphone
so that works nicely.
Expander and gate, this will close off
when I'm not talking, essentially.
So none of the background noise
in your room gets through.
Let's put the ratio up.
Usually we'll start at two to one
to get something happening
and then turn this up and I'll go very quiet.
You can see already it's starting to kick in
at two to one there, so let's turn that up.
Okay, just about there.
Now I'm getting the sweet spot.
What I want to get is this light flicking on and off
as I'm talking, which I'm getting quite nicely.
And that sounds pretty good.
And is it cutting off my F words?
Like fun. Fun.
No, but if I turn it up too high.
Fun, fun, fun, fun.
As you can hear, it's now shutting me down.
So round about here,
not much of an expander gate needed here
but this is basically what I have found to be
the best settings on the DBX 286s.
So as you can see, the gain is two clicks
off the maximum here.
I've got the drive up at just one above two.
I've got the density at just around seven.
The frequency is just above 4k
with the threshold at just one click below three.
LF detail is at three, HF detail is at three.
Threshold is one click below 30.
The ratio is two to one.
The output is just one click above -10
and those are pretty sweet settings
for the Shure SM7B running through a DBX 286s,
straight out to you on this video.
(lively electronic music)
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