If you have ever recorded a vocalist who plays acoustic guitar, you know the scenario. Vocals leaking into the guitar mic, guitar leaking into the vocal mic and both of these problems compromise the options you would have had if you could have recorded each of them isolated. The EQ that makes the guitar sound wonderful puts an edge on the vocalist that makes Darth Vader sound pleasant. And, when you try to compress the vocals or add reverb, the guitar bleed becomes a 300 pound gorilla. The solution: a hyper-cardioid mic on the vocal (some folks call them super-cardioid), and a mic you can put very close to the acoustic without turning it into a monster. I had run into this problem so often, I had planned to buy a condenser with a hyper-cardioid pattern. I had considered either a Neumann KMS 105 or if business is really good, the Neumann M149. Since I have plenty of good expensive vintage tube mics for vocals (Neumann U67s and AKG C12), I decided to save some bucks and try the Alesis GT AM62. The...

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The Manley Massive Passive EQ is a perfect example of recognizing that the old way of doing something was the best way. The passive circuitry by which they accomplish the EQ is made up of very stable components. Since they are not active (containing neither tubes or transistors) they generate no noise and generate less phase problems than active EQ. Manley has added a tube amplification section to then build the gain back to its original level (+4) The unit is stereo and each channel has low pass filters which can be set at 18kHz, 12kHz, 9kHz, 7.5kHz, & 6kHz, high pass filters that are switchable from 22Hz, 39Hz, 68Hz, 120Hz, & 220Hz, 4 EQ bands can be set to either shelf or bell curves, boost or cut, a gain control, bandwidth contol, frequency control and an in/out switch. The Massive Passive has both balanced (XLR) input and output plugs as well as phone jacks which are set at the factory to unbalanced +4. There are provisions internally to change those plugs to -10 and for reversing the phase. The...

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