Sony C-800G Tube Microphone

Used for Gilmour's vocals on *On An Island*, in addition to the title track's Les Paul solo, as mentioned by sound engineer Andy Jackson in this July 2006 *Sound on Sound* article. > "Actually, it's very straightforward — voice — nice microphone, nice mic amp, nice compressor. There you go. For reverbs I tend to be old-school and use an EMT plate. I had a couple of plates and a Lexicon Hall — that was our palette. The vocal chain starts with that Sony tube mic with the heatsink on the side, the C800G, and it is the most fantastic microphone. We have a couple of those, one in the studio and one for David to use at home, which is another reason his demos sounded so good. That feeds an old Neumann V72 mic preamp and then EAR EQs and compressors like the ones I use here in my mastering system. I would compress his voice but only fairly gently with a tickle of 2:1, then maybe do that again on the mix. That's with the exception of the rock songs of course, which were completely mashed in a Fairchild! The thing is, David makes my life easy — stick him on the phone and he sounds great! He is not a difficult person to record — great technique and a great voice." > (...) "Some of the guitars would be from David's home recording as he has a similar amp and effects setup at home. In fact on the guitar solo for 'On An Island' where there are two guitars, the first is a Les Paul and the second one a Strat. He recorded the Les Paul at home using the Sony mic and I recorded the Strat in the studio using the SM57 and the Coles ribbon, so if you want to hear how the two approaches compare, that's a good place to do it." This is restated by Jackson in [this interview from Vol. 6, #7 of *Resolution* Magazine](http://www.davidgilmour.com/press/2007/october/Resolution_October07.pdf). > Well David's very easy, he sounds good on anything, he sound pretty good on a 58, but it's the Sony C800G with the heat sink, horribly expensive, but they're fantastic. I've tried lots of things, and it's really good, it has an openness and a size. We've done all sorts of things over the years, 67, 47, I had him on a Brauner for a while — they all work, he's got a good voice and good technique, so it's not that difficult.

In this inteview, Steve Aoki gives us a look to the main gear he use to produce records in both of his studios : The ''Neon Future Cave'' in Las Vegas, NV and the ''Dim Mak Studio'' in Los Angeles, CA. > There are a lot of mics that I used in the past but I have just got the microphone of all microphones, the Sony C800G. That’s the one I had been looking for and it’s been really difficult to get. > All the new stuff was with the Sony C800G. That’s a vintage tube mic that sounds incredible. It’s definitely one of the highest-level mics in the game, there’s no doubt about that. And it looks sick. It’s just this dope, futuristic looking mic, which is perfect for my studio.

"We record on a Sony C-800 surrounded by a tent of blankets in a sound-proofed closet inside a live/work loft in Chicago."

At 0:05, Kanye is shown recording, "On Sight" using the Sony C-800G

Shawn recorded his song with Camilla Cabello "Senorita" with this tube microphone.

In [this article](http://www.avalondesign.com/testsite/news_090305.html), it quotes Dr. Dre saying, "I like my vocals to sound 'crystal.' I use the Sony C800-G for vocals because it has a clean sound and about 85% of the people that get behind it sound great. My main objective is that the vocal sound is present and clean and ultimately does not distort. I get the sound I want out of the EQ on the SSL. We've used it forever and have made many hits on it, including 50s 'In Da Club'."

Used for vocals on *Brand New Day*, *All This Time* and more. It is mentioned by recording engineer Simon Osborne in this transcribed October 1, 1999 *Audio Media* interview on Sting's official website. > When it comes to recording Sting's vocals, Simon has a standard way of operating, too: "I always go straight to tape rather than through the desk. I use AMS Neve 31105s and a Demiter valve mic amp, which I've used for a long while. I've also got all the usual stuff like Urei 1176s and such. I'll start with a general setting, so a 4:1 ratio, not too fast, with a quick release as a guide. His voice obviously changes depending on the key and dynamic of the tune, so it's important to have an initial set-up that can be tweaked as necessary. In terms of mics, we normally use the Sony C800G, it just works well with Sting's voice." This is restated by Osborne in [this December 1, 2002](https://www.sting.com/news/title/mix-with-simon-osborne) *Mix* interview about , also transcribed on Sting's official website. > "For Sting's vocals, we use a Sony valve mic - the C-800G - the one with the little radiator [Peltier cooling device] fitted on the back. It looks a little daft, but it works. I have some Shep preamps - the Neve copies - which are great on drums. I have a Summit and a couple Demeter valve preamps I use on vocals and bass. Most of the other sounds go through the Shep Neve copies which sound good. The design might be 25 or 30 years old, but the sound is state of the art."

"[Kendrick]'s also had a studio in his tour bus ever since we were on tour for the first album. If he didn’t have that, he’d be recording in GarageBand! So we made it easier for him, and set up this studio in the bus, with a simple setup, consisting of a Pro Tools HD rack, two mics, the Sony C800G and a Telefunken U47 and an Avalon mic pre. Nothing crazy, just stuff that allows us to get down ideas"

Noah 40 uses a sony 800g on drake vocals

A Sound On Sound article from October 2010 talks about the recording process for Eminem's 2010 album [Recovery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_%28Eminem_album%29). Eminem's recording engineer Mike Strange talks about the vocal mic Eminem prefers to record with in the studio: " "We have a large live room at Effigy, and we have Em in there with some gobos, and a Sony C800 microphone, going into an [Avalon 737 mic pre](https://equipboard.com/items/avalon-vt-737sp-mic-preamp). It's the microphone that [Dre](https://equipboard.com/pros/dr-dre) uses, and Em likes it, so he's always used it. In all the years I've worked with him, I don't think we've ever tried another mic. It's a little bit like a guitar player who digs his old Les Paul: you don't take that away from him. We have a few C800 mics, because we tend to burn them up quite quickly. Em has two, I have one, and Luis has two or three. Because it's a fairly modern mic we've never had problems changing from one to another." Original article link [here](http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct10/articles/it-1010.htm).

Microphone can be seen at 0:34.

From the start of the video you can see Mac recording into the Sony C800G Mic

Travis Scott's Instagram story on 2019-09-15 shows him at a recording studio with a C-800G microphone.

"For Gabriel's voice, Chappell often used a Sony C800 valve mic in combination with a Shure SM58, run through external mic amps like the Amek or Neve," [this article](http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may03/articles/gabrielchappell.asp) states.

the mic is seen in the background of this video.

In this clip Lil Wayne is in the studio recording his vocals for "I Don't Know How Fake Feel" he is using a Sony C800G (time stamp 0:32s).

In this performance by Rihanna, she uses the Sony C-800G for recording her voice.

While recording with Dr.Dre, Anderson .Paak uses a Sony C-800G. Can be seen at 3:00.

Spotted a Sony C-800G in this photo.

Charli XCX in the studio with A.G. Cook. Observe the c800g pac.

At 0:39. Chief Keef can be seen recording vocals on a Sony C-800G Microphone at Interscope Records. The microphone is also listed at Interscope Studio's official website.

You can see him posing in front of this mic in the picture.

Britney used the C-800G on two tracks on Circus, according to Andy Page, the co-producer: > "I recorded/engineered/programmed/mixed 2 songs from "Circus", "Out from Under" and "My Baby", both produced by Guy Sigsworth. The vocal chain was a C800G going in to an Avalon 737, then straight into ProTools via a 192."

None about the recording equipment!

Quavo spotted using the c-800g in the second photo of this series of photos on Travis Scott's instagram.

McMorrow posted this on Instagram during the recording sessions for his third album.

Item can be seen throughout the video

Used for "In da Club", as stated by producer Dr. Dre in this transcribed March 2005 interview. > 50 CENT > > "In Da Club" > > Producer: Dr. Dre > > Engineer: Vito (Mauricio Iragorri) > > "With 50, he's an artist with such an amazing voice," says Vito. "You just put him behind a microphone and it just sounds good! My job is make sure it doesn't distort and it's not overloading. While he's vibing and doing his thing, I'm scrambling to make sure nothing is going wrong with the signal path." > > "Recording vocals with Dre is a meticulous process," Vito reveals. "There are some exceptions, like 50 is an exception. There are some people that just do it, and there's not much punching involved. And there are other people who need a lot of punching, and that means maybe a couple words at a time until all the rhythm and the pockets are correct. Dre has an amazing sense of rhythm. He hears all these crazy rhythms in the vocal and, because he's a rapper as well, he knows how it should be performed. As a producer he's great, but as a rapper he knows what pocket they should be hitting and he can really coach someone well. Working with Dre on vocals is cool because you get to see how he directs someone and they actually sound the best they've ever sounded." > > Signal Path: Tracking > > "I like my vocals to sound 'crystal,'" says Dre. "I use the Sony C800-G for vocals because it has a clean sound and about 85% of the people that get behind it sound great. My main objective is that the vocal sound is present and clean and ultimately does not distort. I get the sound I want out of the EQ on the SSL. We've used it forever and have made many hits on it, including 50's 'In Da Club.'" > > "We come from the Sony C800-G and out of that into the Neve 1073 mic pre," explains Vito. "We don't use the EQ, because most of the time it sounds good flat. If there's a need for it we'll engage it, but for 50 Cent on 'In Da Club' we didn't use any EQ. Then we took it out of the Neve mic pre into the Avalon 737-SP compressor. It's a mic pre with EQ, and it actually has a compressor, but we're not using any of the mic pre on the Avalon - we're just going straight into the line input. From the output of the Neve it goes into the line input of the Avalon, which allows you to use the compressor alone. We set the compression ratio around 7:1 and the threshold usually hovers at around 0. I set it at a medium attack and fast release. I'd say we're using around 3 or 4 dB of compression, sometimes up to 7 dB. On 'In Da Club' it was about 4 or 5. Then it comes back into the SSL 4000 G with E modules (at Encore Studio) and we bring it back on the insert. > > "There's a patch on the patch bay that says 'insert return,'" he continues, "and that's where we bring the vocal back into the insert return, because it's the shortest patch before you actually hear the vocal. It has the least amount of circuitry of anything in the channel, so you're bypassing the EQ, the dynamics. You could use it all, but if you really want the shortest, cleanest signal, that's the way to go. Then we bus it out to Pro Tools HD and we use the small fader to send it to PT. That's about it." > > Discovery > > "The way we came to this chain is - a while ago, when I first started out, I was assisting for Dr. Dre," says Vito. "I noticed how their engineer was doing it and it sounded good. The records sounded amazing, so when Dre hired me to engineer, I told him, 'Ya gotta buy some of these,' and he bought some 1073s. I had heard for a long time that they were really good mic pre's to run vocals through. At Encore, where I was assisting, they had one there, and anytime we were doing a session we would always run vocals through it. So when I saw Dre doing it, it was just cool seeing a rap guy using a 1073! That's how we came up with it. As for the compressor, it's just a good tube-sounding compressor. Sometimes we use the DBX 160 - the original - as an alternate compressor; it sounds good and we've used that on a lot of records." > > Signal Path: Mixdown > > The Yamaha SPX-1000 played a prominent role in mixdown. "We used a REV-5 room setting," says Vito. "There are a couple patches in there that sound really good. They're old reverbs and they're not the best nor most expensive, but they sound good, they're reliable, and that's all that matters! For R&B the Lexicon reverbs sound great. They work good for R&B, but for rap the SPX works good. We've used Lexicon's before too and they work okay. It's depends on the song and the artist and what you're looking for in the song. Like on Eve's stuff we used the SPX-1000, too."

> “The mics were a combination of Sony C800G and Rode NT2,” he adds. “About 60 percent of the vox were on the Rode.

This microphone can be seen in this photo of a makeshift studio that Cardi B and her engineer created.

"SONY C800g good good good!!"

Used "in a session with Pharrell" and on *Blessed*, as stated by Busta recording engineer Rayshawn Woolard in this August 1, 2008 *Electronic Musician* interview. > Working with recording engineers Rande Jackson and Rayshawn Woolard (who double as part of Busta's onstage crew), Busta prefers either a Neumann U 87 or Sony C800G microphone. Reporting that “Busta is very loud in the studio” (though he typically sits down to record), Woolard illustrates the rapper's technique of adding accents or “groups” to the main vocal. > (...) “The U 87 is an old faithful,” Busta attests. “But as I had the opportunity to play around with different mics, I came upon the C800 in a session with Pharrell. When he got me on that microphone, I was able to hear my breathing in such a clear way that it almost scared me. The clarity is phenomenal. I could be in any part of the room; I didn't even have to stand up on the mic. I could say shit and the Sony mic would pick it up exactly how I wanted it to be heard. Sometimes if I wanted the ambience in the room to sound like 10 or 20 people, I would just stand in different parts of the room and shout or say shit at low to moderate levels. The C800 mic picked up everything so beautifully. > “I usually leave the vocal the way I record it,” he adds. “The only thing we might fix is a punch if it sounds a little rough. Then we go into Pro Tools and smooth out the punch. If I've done the punch 1,000 times and it's not coming out better, humanwise, then we make the corrections in the machine so that the punch doesn't compromise the performance and the song.”

Electronic Musician lists a Sony C800G microphone as part of Guy Sigsworth's kit list at the end of the article.

Throughout this whole video you can see Ja Rule recording on Sony c-800G tube microphone.

Credited on the _Plays Wooden Child_ album: "David Tibet only sings Assyrian and Babylonian using the following microphones, which he utterly endorses"

Aaron Carter can be seen recording with a Sony c800g in his Instagram post.

She's singing her song "Piece of Mind" from 'SweetSexySavage' at around 4:22

In diesem Video sieht man Kollegah bei 2:24 das Sony C-800G benutzen.