Michael Stipe

Used for vocals on Murmur and Reckoning, as recalled by producer Mitch Easter in the following sources. It also appears in the music video for "So. Central Rain" starting at 0:08.

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.

Sound on Sound, November 2009

Standing on the left side of the studio, Peter Buck used Easter's own Ampeg, wide open without gobos and miked with an EV 635 or, for some overdubs, a compressed Neumann U47 FET. Meanwhile, a second FET 47 was used for Michael Stipe's vocals, which he recorded standing on the landing of a staircase positioned just below the control room and above a recreational basement area. "He still had this thing of loving to be invisible,” remarks Easter, "and so he'd go there, turn off all the lights and sing.”

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."

“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.