Then what’s great about the room is there’s all these little booby traps everywhere. Like, I have two mics in the top of the room that are really great for backup vocals, or acoustic room sound. I’ll often record that in addition to stuff. They’re both Coles [4038] mics which sound kind of odd.

Used for bass on Songs for the Deaf, as stated by producer Eric Valentine in this September 14, 2019 "Making Records with Eric Valentine" video at 29:02.

And then, there's this track. And so this amp is a Peavey Decade and it's an amp about this big. It's a tiny little Peavey solid state practice amp. (...) And it has a really cool little saturation knob in there, or distortion knob, and so it would get cool distortion and you could have it at really low volume and I ended up putting a Coles 4038 right up on it and a Cole 4038 normally would not be able to handle low end at all. Like, if you put it in front of a bass amp with any reasonable amount of volume, it would just totally probably rip the ribbon in half. But this thing, you would set it super super quiet, just whisper quiet with this Coles 4038 up on it and it got the most incredible low end. [plays audio track] And it ended up being the majority of the bass sound for the record. It's an amazing sound. [laughs] Tiny little amp, this big. But ultimately, it's a blend of all these.

Mix engineer Tommaso Colliva on recording Drones : "We had some stereo room mics, like the DPA 4006s and Coles 4038s."

"When it comes to microphones, Arnalds relies mostly on a pair of Neumann KM84s that he bought from the estate of Hansa Studios owner Peter Meisel. He is tickled by the notion that they were most likely used on some of the classic albums made in Berlin by the likes of David Bowie and U2. "They're in perfect shape and they're marked with his name,” he says. "They're my go-to condensers, but I also have a pair of Coles 4038 [ribbons], which I use a lot on the piano.”"

Used as an overhead mic for “Every Breath You Take”, as mentioned by producer Hugh Padgham in this March 2004 Sound on Sound interview.

"At AIR Montserrat, the dining area had a gabled ceiling and reflective wooden floor, so I recorded Stewart's drums with room mics while also close-miking the kit, similar to how I recorded Phil Collins. There was a [Shure] SM57 on the snare, [Sennheiser] 421s on the toms, Coles 4038 ribbon mics for the overheads, and [Neumann] 87s as room mics, placed about 10 to 15 feet away and compressed a little bit. Obviously, we didn't use the room sound as much as we did for Phil, but it still provided Stewart's sound with a certain liveliness.”

"Tracking today with the '56 Gibson J-45 on a vintage Coles 4038…"

But back to those layers of guitar—can you take us through the song “Hold On?” I used a number of small variations with the amps, and that’s where I really got into the layering. I had three different half-stacks out there—two Blackstars and an old Hiwatt, with each head going to the same cabinet. So I had six different rhythm guitars essentially doing the same thing. I’d get three different tones with each guitar, miked close with a [Neumann] U 67 and a Coles [ribbon mic] about 10 feet out from the cabinet. And then each tone was spread across three tracks, so I had 18 tracks of guitar.

At 10:40 in this video, Rhett Shull discusses options for micing low wattage amplifiers. He says:

One of my favorite microphones of all time is the Cole’s 4038. This is a legendary microphone for not just guitar cabs but for vocals, drum overheads, room mics. You can use these for everything and they sound great. But, these are ribbon microphones and they have an SPL limit. They don't like really high volume or SPL loads, which means they are not good to stick in front of a loud amp that is moving a lot of air, but they can sound incredible in front of a small combo like this, especially when you back the mic off the cabinet a few feet to decrease the proximity effect.

Used for a string of unplugged concerts in 2017, this mic is used to pick up his guitar. This is seen in various clips uploaded on YouTube from his show in Napoli.

As seen in the photo, Isaac is using an Coles Electroacoustics 4038.

At 0:34 in the Reverb interview video titled "How Patrick Carney Gets His Drum Sound," Patrick Carney discusses using the Coles Electroacoustics 4038 Ribbon Microphone for his tom drums.

Used to record Mark Colenburg's drumming for The Renaissance, as stated in Q-Tip's January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

Just as Open benefited enormously from the signature thwack-driven power of drummer Mark Colenburg, so too did the beats on The Renaissance — many of which were either reprocessed from the original sessions or based on recuts that Colenburg tracked using a Clavia ddrum SE-4 electronic drum kit. The kit has long been a favorite of Q-Tip's for its signature ability to compress drum sounds into a tube-warmed veil that maintains the snap of the original sample while creating a gritty, tape-baked sheen.

“I got hip to that just through searching,” Tip explains. “I have the Roland V-Drums, but with the ddrum, the way the brain processes the sound is just dope. I sampled and chopped up a lot of the drums on the album and then routed them through that. There's compression when you load sounds into the brain, so it really keeps the integrity of the drum sounds nice and even. Then we triggered everything up — I use a Ludwig Vistalite acoustic kit with a Black Beauty snare — and we'd run it through the ddrum and put that back in the room, as well. We'd have a monitor in the room and then mic that, too.”

Once Colenburg's original drum tracks — which were usually recorded with a pair of Coles 4038 ribbon mics and various combinations for the kick, snare and hi-hat — had been processed and loaded into the electronic kit, a live pass of ddrums would often be blended in or used to entirely replace the original. “It was a headache to get the sounds into it,” Wells recalls. “You had to use an old-style MIDI sample dump. But once they were in there, Mark would replay his original drum sounds to give us a take with no dynamics and just a solid groove all the way through. That allowed us to really integrate the drum kit itself between being a real kit and an electronic one. It was all Tip's idea originally, and Mark obviously had a lot of fun with it.”