SM57 vs. ADX51 On Cello

It's summer here in our college town which means, among many other things, that there's a lack of musicians around. So, church starts to look a lot more acoustic than it might normally otherwise. Consequentially, that means no drums. We've had cajon a few times but no one has touched the kit in well over a month.

So, without much thought, we decided to swap out the trusty SM57 for one of our drum overheads, the Audix ADX51, on cello and subsequently forgot about it.

Then, one of the other techs started asking me what it was that I had done to the cello's channel settings to make it sound, well, magical. I'd love to take credit for it but I had no idea. I had noticed it too, though. The cello sounded fuller; I could get its lows to emulate the bass guitar and could get the growls to really shine through the mix. But, I hadn't actually changed much of anything. So what was different?

Now, believe it or not, we're not complete morons. Keep in mind that this is a church branch that sets up in an elementary school every week, so we're not used to putting a lot of thought into such things. We're usually much more concerned about making sure the system is working and sounding half decent.

But, we've been allowed to stay set up this summer and finally have some time to think. And, of course, it did occur to us pretty quickly that it was, indeed, a different microphone than usual.

Now some of you might get on to me for comparing these two as it's basically comparing apples to oranges; a dynamic to a condenser. Of course they sound different. Why is that any surprise? It's not at all.

I wanted to do this 'shootout' so that I could publish the experience we had here and the difference it made to the mix. And I was fully prepared to come in and compare their frequency responses and try to make some sort of analysis like that but, honestly, you'll be able to just hear it for yourself. I tried to set the gains equal but that clearly didn't work out quite like I wanted:



I think it's plainly clear how much more body the ADX51 is giving the cello; especially evident on the lower note. Until something with even more desirable sparkle comes along to challenge it, I think I'm going to make this my go-to mic for cello, and pending other bowed string instruments. I am just in love with the raw tone.

And since I had all these set up today, it seemed only natural to mix them together and let me tell ya, the super warm 57 AND the massive body of the 51? Awesome. Unfortunately, we won't usually have two channels for cello.

Oh and I should probably explain what the ECM8000 is doing there. Well as I mentioned in my last post, it is a reference microphone and, in theory, has a fairly flat frequency response. I included it here just to be a kind of baseline to compare how much the other two are coloring the sound.