Tom Waits

Used for vocals on The Heart of Saturday Night, Small Changes, Foreign Affairs, Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine, as stated by producer "Bones" Howe in this February 2004 Sound on Sound interview. It is visible in "Bones Howe's layout diagrams for the Foreign Affairs sessions at Wally Heider Studio 4, showing the layout for the jazz band recordings" and the "[d]iagram for the Foreign Affairs sessions at Wally Heider Studio 4 showing the layout used for the orchestral track recordings" from the same interview.

Tom Waits's voice itself is a unique instrument. For that, Howe went back to his old standby, the classic RCA 77 DX ribbon mic. "The 77s have three cardioid settings," he explains. "V1 and V2 were different low-end cutoffs, and 'M' was for music recording. The V1 setting had a high cutoff, which made it good for radio announcing; the V2 position left a lot more low end in there and made it a great vocal microphone." The signal ran through a UREI 1176 compressor/limiter set with what Howe swears are the best parameter settings that can be configured on it for vocals: threshold/attack at 6, release at 7, and a 12:1 compression ratio. "Tom popped and spat a lot when he sang, so the 77 was perfect, because it's very hard to pop that microphone, so you didn't need a pop filter. Plus he liked to get right on the mic, so he would sit at the piano and I hung it from a boom so it would hang down in front of him. On some tracks we'd set it up directly in front of the band and he's stand in front of the drums and sing. On 'Step Right Up' you can almost hear him flipping pages of lyrics. He was always surrounded by the music and the records sound like it. We never used headphones. Never."

In this interview from the March/April 2008 issue of Tape Op Magazine, Howe stated the following, which affirms the use of the 77-DX on Waits' recordings.

My favorite mic was the [RCA] 77-DX, and I used it for vocals on everything I did. Years later I tried to find those mics and only a couple of people had them. They wanted a lot of money to rent them. Ribbon mics were amazing for brass, saxophone and vocals.

Used as a vocal mic, as mentioned in this interview from the October 1987 issue of Musician Magazine, as documented in this page from the website Tom Waits Library.

Microphones of choice include a Ribbon ("Dave Garroway") and RCA high-impedance mikes; Waits usually sings through a Shure Green Bullet (used mostly by harmonica players). Also an Altec 21D vocal mike- "because Sinatra used it."

Garroway was famous for his use of the BK-4A Starmaker lavalier ribbon mic.