now this is something that comes up quite often and it's likely because some budget
priced microphones include the wrong cable and also give incorrect information but
in this home recording for beginners video i'm going to show you how to connect an xlr mic to
your pc using an audio interface and i'm going to show you for both condenser mics
and dynamic microphones plus stick around after that for the most common mistake that people make
i'm zane welcome to audio tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can
unleash your creative beast and i've included links to all of the gear that i'm going to
be using in this video they're down in the description but this is going to work with
pretty much every xlr microphone and every audio interface that has microphone preamps in it which
is pretty much all of them so two of the most popular types of microphones are condenser mics
and dynamic microphones and i'm not going to go into the differences between the two in this video
just know that condenser microphones require phantom power dynamic mics do not so let's start
with the dynamic mic and see how we connect it to our audio interface okay so you can see i have a
shure sm57 dynamic mic here and a focusrite 2i2 audio interface and the first thing we want to do
is connect our microphone so we're going to plug the female end of the xlr mic into our microphone
and then we're going to plug the other end into our audio interface all right so that's it for the
connection now when you're setting your levels you want to make sure you set the levels on the audio
interface before it gets into the software so you don't want to adjust the levels in the software
until you have the levels correct on the audio interface so i'm just going to talk into this
microphone right now and you'll see the led on the audio interface start to get green
and then orange and then red and red means it's clipping so let's look at that right now all
right so what i'm going to do is just turn this up about halfway and we'll hear how it sounds
so this is me talking into the shure sm57 microphone connected to the focusrite 2i2
audio interface and the gain is just a little over halfway all right this is almost cranked all the
way up and you can see we have some light action going on with the focusrite we're in the green
there which is considered a good signal but it's still a little bit low so if i were to talk louder
we would get the signal a lot better also i want to show you what it looks like when we're clipping
and what it sounds like when we're clipping and you do not want to do this so let's hear that
i've now got it cranked all the way up and you can see it's going into the red there when i
talk a little bit louder and you can see the levels on the screen are quite loud you do not
want to do this when you're testing the levels for your microphone so let's turn this back
so that was setting up a dynamic microphone now before we get into setting up a condenser
mic i just want to ask if you're enjoying this video so far and getting some value out of it
can you please give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel out and i appreciate it so much now
let's look at connecting a condenser microphone all right so we're going to connect this the exact
same way that we did the physical connection on the dynamic mic we're going to plug the female end
into the microphone and the other ends going into the audio interface one big difference
here is that we're now going to press the 48 volt phantom power button you can see the led is lit up
on the focus right now that means we have phantom power so let's look at what the recording
difference is like with this microphone all right so i don't even have any levels on the microphone
yet and you can see i have a signal going in so let's turn this up to about halfway all right so
this is turned up halfway on the focusrite 2i2 and the levels are all right you can see that
there's some led action going on with our meter on the focus right it's turning green which suggests
that it's a good signal now i'm going to turn it up a little bit more and see what it's like
i'm at about three quarters of the way and you can see i'm starting to clip
so this is what it sounds like when this microphone clips it is the mxl 990 microphone
so i'm going to turn it to about two o'clock there and these levels are pretty good for the way that
i'm speaking right now you can see that the led is pretty much green the whole time the levels on
the screen look all right they could be a little bit louder but this is an all right signal now one
thing that you don't want to do with a condenser microphone is disconnect it while the phantom
power is turned on so before you disconnect it you want to make sure you turn off that phantom power
all right now i'm going to show you the biggest mistake that i see when people connect their
xlr microphones to their audio interfaces and that's using one of these cables where one end
is an xlr cable like this and the other end is a quarter-inch trs cable and a lot of
these microphones actually come shipped with these cables and it's the wrong
cable i've even seen condenser microphones listings for condenser microphones on amazon
that come with this type of a cable here now the one i have is actually in a harness but i'm
going to connect it now just this one part to our dynamic microphone and we'll hear how that sounds
alright so i have the shure sm57 connected to the xlr to trs cable right now and it's
connected to the focusrite as you can see and i'm recording into audacity and as you can see
the gain is turned all the way down so what you're hearing is me talking into a different microphone
but now i'm going to switch over to that mic and start talking into it while increasing the gain
all right so i'm talking into the sure sm57 we're just over halfway right now it looks like
there's a bit of a signal going into audacity now we're at three quarters of the way and now it's
cranked max so this is with the gain maxed out on the focusrite 2i2 connecting a sure sm57 dynamic
microphone with an xlr to trs cable so now i'm just going to flick the switch over to instrument
to see if that makes any difference all right so i just flicked it over to instrument you can see
now it does increase the gain so let's back this up a bit and hear how that sounds this is a test
of the shure sm57 dynamic microphone connected to the focusrite 2i2 using an xlr to trs cable
this is a test testing one two three all right this is a test of the shure sm57
dynamic microphone connected to the focusrite 2i2 using an xlr to xlr cable this is a test testing
one two three all right so now watch when i flick the switch it's not going to make a difference
when we're connected to the mic preamp so i'll flick the switch back and you can see
no difference is really made there alright and one final thing that i should mention about connecting
xlr microphones to an audio interface is when you have a microphone like the shure sm57 here it
requires a lot of gain and other microphones like the shure sm7b also require a lot of gain and you
might want to look at getting something like this this is called a fat head right here and there's
other manufacturers like cloud lifter and other ones out there but basically this is an inline
microphone preamp that gives you 20 decibels of clean gain so i think the focusrite 2i2 will give
you 50 decibels again or 52 somewhere around there this is going to up it another 20 decibels so you
get more clean gain for your microphone so i'm going to connect that right now to the shure sm57
and we'll test out how it sounds with the fet head on it and one thing to note the fat head
and cloud lifters things like that require phantom power so i'm going to engage the phantom power now
and i'm going to get a decent level you can see i don't even have the levels checked yet but there's
a signal going in with zero on the gain meter so let's crank this up to halfway and here i am
talking into the shure sm57 microphone connected to a fet head and the gain on the focusrite 2i2 is
about halfway this is what it sounds like i'm just going to crank it a little bit more
and you can see that i'm getting tons of gain there i'm really not talking that loud into it
but the signal level is really nice going into audacity right now just like that and if i were
to crank this it would absolutely distort this thing like crazy so i'm not going to do that
but this is something that you may want to invest in something like a fat head or a cloud lifter
i'll link to those down in the description just in case you want some more information and check out
the latest pricing on those but they are a great investment and i use mine on this microphone plus
my shure sm7b i use it all the time it gives you clean gain and pretty much any dynamic microphone
will benefit from having extra clean gain now if you're interested in connecting an external mic
preamp to your audio interface click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends
if you like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos
like this thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon