Shure MV88+ How to set up for music recording

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Hi. I'm here today to talk to you about the MV88+ Video Kit and a couple different ways you can set it up to record music.

So, here's the microphone itself. This is the MV88+ microphone. There is a micro-B on the back where your cables get plugged into, and there's also a headphone port, which is great to dial in your sound before you're recording and also monitor your recording as you're doing some overdubs or anything along those lines.

So, there's a mic clip in the box. Make sure your black Shure logo is facing up and the "L" and the "R" on the mic are on the correct sides.

I'm going to go ahead and take our phone clamp that comes with it, slots right in and then tighten that down, so now I got my mic and my clamp together.

Go ahead and take my phone, drop it in right here. Give it a little squeeze while you tighten on the knob and that gets it all nice and secure.

So, I got my phone and mic clip are all one piece now. You'll take our Manfrotto Pixie tripod that comes in the bottom, right into the quarter inch thread.

If you press down this red button then the ball head can rotate, and you can position this however you need. You can even point the microphone toward yourself if that's your workflow.

Then we're going to finish off with our lightning cable. The kit comes to a USB-C and a lightning cable for iPhones or Androids respectively. We're using my iPhone today, so we're using lightning cable.

So, let's dig into the app. That's really where the options for musicians really, really get fun.

Across the top, there's a couple of quick touch DSP modes. This is if you want to get up and running really quickly. It gets you in the ballpark of really great sounding for whatever you do.

So, this one is called, "Loud Mode." It's great for your drum set. Your loud electric guitars. Your live concerts. Your band practice. Stuff along those lines.

This one's called, "Acoustic Instrument." It's for acoustic guitar and violin and cello and even piano. Any sort of general acoustic instrument, it's great for. There's a singing mode which is obviously great for song vocals. There's a speech mode which is more for speech less for musician, but if you have a higher pitched voice or you need a little bit more low-end support, the speech can actually sound really cool in a musical application as well.

There's a gain knob up here or slider. This is a very important aspect. You want to get your levels right.

We have a gray area on the meters here. That's where you want most of your peaks to end up in. That's what we call, "the sweet spot."

There's a very important control here called, "Monitor Mix." This is, say you're working in Garage Band or something, where you're doing an overdub. I just recorded my acoustic guitar and now I want to sing over it.

The Monitor Mix doesn't control the volume of the headphone, but it controls the content of what you hear. So, playback, if you go all the way to one side, will turn off the direct monitoring that you get off of the microphone and only hear what's coming back from your app.

If you want the opposite of that, where you only want to hear the direct monitoring of your microphone and not what's coming back from the app, you pull the slider over here. It lives right in the middle. Most of the time you want to leave it in the middle, but just in case you're working in Garage Band that has really great software monitoring, that's how you get around that.

Coming down to the bottom of the app here, there's a compressor which has a couple of settings.
For music, you want to live in the light or medium range unless you're doing something like drums where that tend to sound really great compressed, so you can go crank that up to heavy.

The high pass filter for music, you pretty much want to leave alone at 75. That gets rid of some low rumble stuff but doesn't really affect the rest of the sound.

And then the EQ is a total personal creative choice, so you want a bunch of low-end, you can really crank up that bass. So, you're doing an acoustic guitar, and you want a little bit more bright intimate detailed sound, you can do that.

And what's important to remember here is all of these settings that you configure live in the microphone itself, not our app. So, you can dial it up however you need.

Our app is a great stereo recorder, but it doesn't do multi-track. So, if you wanted to do that type of thing you're working in Garage Band, you configure the microphone in the app however you need, you can leave our app go into Garage Band and all those settings come with you on the mic, and they'll stay that way until you come back and change them.

So, it's a super configurable way to stay in your workflow, working however you like.
So that's a couple of different ways you can set up our app to record music.