Michael Stipe

“Michael [Stipe] wanted to do all his vocals in the control room; we liked the immediacy of being able to work next to each other,” confides Candiloro. “So I put up a straight mic stand and an Audio-Technica AE5400 with no pop filter and ran that into the John Hardy M-1 mic pre. Although we did the basic tracks on 2-inch 24-track analog, by the time we were recording vocals we dumped everything into Pro Tools.”

“Michael [Stipe] wanted to do all his vocals in the control room; we liked the immediacy of being able to work next to each other,” confides Candiloro. “So I put up a straight mic stand and an Audio-Technica AE5400 with no pop filter and ran that into the John Hardy M-1 mic pre. Although we did the basic tracks on 2-inch 24-track analog, by the time we were recording vocals we dumped everything into Pro Tools.”

At 1:37-1:39 on the live video (Perfect Square 2004) you can clearly see that the mic he's holding has the same ridges near the bottom that the Shure U2 SM58 has, as well as having the same antenna.

“During the recording I really didn’t use much processing at all,” Candiloro states. “On fitting his vocal in the mix, most of what I wanted to hear was his voice naturally. Every so often I used a Waves C4 multi-band compressor if I needed to pull certain frequencies out. With less heavy compression I could get the vocal to breath a little bit more. We were on the SSL 9000J but I didn’t use their compressor, I was using an [Universal Audio] LA-2A. With Pro Tools you can do some quick automation and it’s always going to sound more natural than compressing the life out of something just to get it to cut through. Michael likes plate reverb on his voice, so we used that too.”

“During the recording I really didn’t use much processing at all,” Candiloro states. “On fitting his vocal in the mix, most of what I wanted to hear was his voice naturally. Every so often I used a Waves C4 multi-band compressor if I needed to pull certain frequencies out. With less heavy compression I could get the vocal to breath a little bit more. We were on the SSL 9000J but I didn’t use their compressor, I was using an [Universal Audio] LA-2A. With Pro Tools you can do some quick automation and it’s always going to sound more natural than compressing the life out of something just to get it to cut through. Michael likes plate reverb on his voice, so we used that too.”

“During the recording I really didn’t use much processing at all,” Candiloro states. “On fitting his vocal in the mix, most of what I wanted to hear was his voice naturally. Every so often I used a Waves C4 multi-band compressor if I needed to pull certain frequencies out. With less heavy compression I could get the vocal to breath a little bit more. We were on the SSL 9000J but I didn’t use their compressor, I was using an [Universal Audio] LA-2A. With Pro Tools you can do some quick automation and it’s always going to sound more natural than compressing the life out of something just to get it to cut through. Michael likes plate reverb on his voice, so we used that too.”

“When we did Michael’s vocals we were at Hit Factory/Criteria in Studio E. It’s a mid-size control room with two outboard racks at tabletop height with a walkway between the two. In the middle is where we set up his mic stand,” explains Candiloro. “On one side was outboard gear on top of the rack and the other side was Michael’s station with his headphones ready to go. He liked the Fostex T-50s and we used the same pair for the whole record. Most of the time it would only be Pat [McCarthy] and myself in the control room with headphones on while Michael was doing his vocals. He would work the mic — grab it sometimes. He’s very consistent. He’s been doing it for a long time and knows his voice so well. It’s an instrument he’s kept in great shape; he knows exactly how to work a mic.”