Used for vocals on Murmur and Reckoning, as recalled by producer Mitch Easter.

Mix Online, February 1, 2009

Mills’ bass amp was miked with a Neumann FET U47 from eight or so feet away, according to Dixon, who says he spent more time on vocals for Reckoning than on anything else. He often gave Stipe a ride to the studio about noon, and they would sing for a few hours in the quiet studio, replacing scratch vocals from the previous day.

“We had Michael sing into a FET 47 — the transistor version of the famous 47 — and it sounded great. It had a good forwardness about it,” Easter says. “The processing on Michael, the thing that seemed to be the magic formula, was a touch of this thing called the EXR Exciter. It was one of those mystery treble-boosting things, and that gave him a touch of brightness.” Also included in Stipe’s vocal chain were a DeltaLab delay, set to only about 16 milliseconds, and a UREI 1176 compressor.

Vintage King, June 11, 2019

For the vocals, we used a Neumann U47 FET, and I think a lot of the selection was made by Michael Stipe. He saw the mic sitting there with its perfectly spherical windscreen and said, “That’s cute, let’s use that one.” It just so happened that the U47 was the perfect microphone for his voice. The u47 has a bit of a lift in the upper mids, which brought out the gravelly sound of his voice really well.

The rest of it was really straight-forward. Back then, no one used outboard mic pres. You had an expensive professional console and that’s why you had it. So we just used the MCI console preamp with an 1176 to compress it on the way in.

We tried to come up with a signature vocal sound for that record, which was done by adding an EXR Exciter coming back off the tape. The EXR was sort of an Aphex Exciter copy. We also used these DeltaLab delays, not the blue Effectrons that people remember, but these black DL1 delays that cost more and had XLR connections. It had these two toggle switches that would adjust the delay times in tiny increments; the max delay was like 128 ms. It had two channels so you could set two short delays, which we dialed in to be THE Michael Stipe sound.

If there was any reverb it would have been an EMT 140. The studio had Lexicon 224s and all the new digital stuff, but we thought the 140 sounded better. We used the digital units as special effects for a splatter on the snare drum or something, which was very fashionable at the time. It was all a very late ‘70s kind of approach."