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Holy crap I’m so stoked over buying this new mic. It’s made my life so much easier and if you haven’t checked it out yourself you really need to. It just came out a few months ago.
By the way, I’m fresh off the release of newest course “Community Cash”, if you haven’t checked that out yet.
Huge shoutout to my long-time elite member BJ Ocampo who called me out for not releasing episodes every week as promised! I mean really though, what excuse could I possibly have that would prevent me from speaking into a microphone for 20 minutes a week. Unexcusable!
I’ve recently changed my recording setup which is now more leaner and portable, due to this new mic, so I figured it would be good to make this episode about my audio setup for podcasting. If you’re into any kind of audio or video content creation you should definitely give this is a listen.
Even if you just want to do better zoom calls and have more pro-sounding audio, this is for you.
(full disclosure: Some of the links below are amazon links that I receive a small commission on if you purchase via them).
New Microphone, Less Equipment!
Late last year I saw something in a facebook ad that got my giddy as a schoolgirl. Shure microphones had released a brand new mic built specifically for content creators/streamers/podcasters, the MV7.
Now for years I’ve been happy using the inexpensive but great-sounding ATR-2100 (I even spray painted mine black since I liked it better than silver) but I always secretly wanted the shure sm7b, which all the “cool” podcasters and content creators have been using the past few years.
I never bought the sm7b because, well it’s $399, and I couldn’t justify spending that just for a cool looking mic at marginably better quality, but even more so because you also need to buy a “cloudlifter” aka another device, just to give it enough power to actually work. Which is another $100 plus having to plug another thing in. To use an Sm7b you need the cloudlifter, and an interface (which is a device that connects your microphone to your computer) and it just to me makes the whole setup a little more clunky than I’d like.
But NOW, with the MV7 out … you don’t need any of that. You can just take that wicked cool looking mic and plug it directly into your laptop via usb.
It looks amazing, it even lights up with volume controls, mute, and a recording mix all via touch on the mic itself. You can even plug your headphones right into the mic and hear everything in real time.
Get broadcast-sounding voice in REAL TIME
Want to sound professional in real time? Instead of doing things like compression and limiting and EQ after you record, or having to use a separate piece of hardware like a mixer or compressor, it comes with it’s own app called shure “motiv” (free) that does it all for you while you record! So get that broadcast-sounding voice easily in real time.
That means you can add compression to your voice and make it all sound boomy and present, while you do your webinar, live, zoom, or podcast. No hardware necessary. This solution was SO long overdue. You just pick the kind of sound you want to be like (dark, normal, bright, for example) and it does it’s thing!
It’s also got a limiter, which prevents your voice from clipping if you get too loud, and has an even more spectacular feature …. “auto mode” where you can set the distance to near or far, depending on how close or far you’ll be from the mic, and it will AUTO-LEVEL your sound for you.
This just blew my mind. Because everyone using those sm7b’s and most other mics, have to set their input levels and crank their mouths up against the mic, or turn it up so high if they’re far, that background noise becomes unbearable and you hear every little echo.
With the MV7’s auto level feature, you can put the mic a foot or two away from your mouth so it’s out of the way and it’ll lower and increase the sensitivity as you speak, so background noises get cut out but your voice stays consistently loud. EAT THAT SM7B users!
My old audio setup, was using a mic like the ATR2100 and then plug to an interface and then into my computer and doing post processing etc. Or pluggin my mic into a mixer and adding compression at the same time saving me post production EQ … but now it’s just the MV7 plugged in and that’s IT.
If you’re doing any kind of content that involves using a mic, this is the one to get.