Blue Yeti USB Mic on Prime Days

RichM

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If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the Blue Yeti USB Mic for 89.99 and free shipping. Great deal for a great mic!
 
If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the Blue Yeti USB Mic for 89.99 and free shipping. Great deal for a great mic!

I just saw that myself before coming here. Thanks for sharing the info.

Yes, this is a great mic for folks that want to skip all the tech-talk, and get to recording right away.

just know that it is kinda HUGE on the desk standing about 14" high with about a 5" dia. footprint, but great that it comes with it's own stand, but can also be attached to the pole on a regular mic stand via threads in the bottom, as well as there is a spider-cage shockmount for it specially made for it by Blue Microphones, which is a great company with some very high-end mics...

[I already own all kinds of other mics, including the AKG Perception 220, Apogee MiC, Behringer C2 condenser stereo matched pair, ElectroVoice ND/767a, Shure SM57, SM58, Audio-Technica AT-3350, and a few shotgun mics I can't remember the models of now, as well as have rented or borrowed TONS of other much more expensive mics (yes I've been doing recording and audio and video production for over 30 yrs now, and different mics are used for different situations) - HOWEVER, if I already did not have enough mics and preamps, covering many usage-scenarios, the Blue YETI would be near the top of my list, especially for the price]
 
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Booli:

Thanks for your many contributions to this forum. I am going to go out and buy a Blue Yeti.
And by the way, welcome back. You were gone for a while.

all the best,
Luke
 
Booli:

Thanks for your many contributions to this forum. I am going to go out and buy a Blue Yeti.
And by the way, welcome back. You were gone for a while.

all the best,
Luke

Luke -

Thanks for the kind words...

Glad you are going to get started? with recording. Blue makes some great mics - cant go wrong with the Yeti.

I've been wanting to simplify my recording setup so when last week I found a used Zoom H1 recorder for half the price of a new unit, I grabbed it.

Overall I am very pleased with it's functions.

The built-in X/Y stereo mics sound great to me, and you can plug in different sources as well. You can also use it as a USB mic on the computer, and with a powered USB hub, as a USB mic on your iOS device.

When standalone, it is powered from a single AA battery, and when on USB it is powered from USB.

Another nice convenience is the headphone jack, which allows you to monitor your recordings, both to the internal microSD card, as well as to the computer in REAL TIME, with zero latency.

Ideally, my recording setup will be simplified down to using either the Apogee MiC (which is great, and discussed many times previously here on UU) or the Zoom H1, and I am going to see if this covers all bases by putting away all my other recording stuff for a while.

Another use-case is to run the output of the iRig Acoustic Stage (which is great, discussed previously here on UU and Baz did a great review here) into the Zoom H1, which I have also tested and works well...

Please let me know how the Blue Yeti works out for you, and...

Good luck with your recording adventures! :)
 
It was a choice between the Apogee MiC and the Blue Yeti. The Apogee has higher sampling rate at 96 kHz, but the 48 kHz on the Blue Yeti is no slouch either. And I like the price.

My goal is to do multi-track recordings using Garageband, so the Zoom H1 wouldn't work for me. The Zoom H4 does multi-track recordings but from what I have read, you need an engineering degree to operate it. I want something simple to use, that has only a couple of buttons to push, and for that reason the Yeti seems to fit the bill.

Thanks for all your help.

Luke
 
Another use-case is to run the output of the iRig Acoustic Stage (which is great, discussed previously here on UU and Baz did a great review here) into the Zoom H1, which I have also tested and works well...

I was at the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet on Sunday, and at one of the uke booths, a guy showed me a little pickup that slipped under the strings in front of the bridge. It worked great there, so I picked on up - only $40, so how wrong could it be?
 
It was a choice between the Apogee MiC and the Blue Yeti. The Apogee has higher sampling rate at 96 kHz, but the 48 kHz on the Blue Yeti is no slouch either. And I like the price.

My goal is to do multi-track recordings using Garageband, so the Zoom H1 wouldn't work for me. The Zoom H4 does multi-track recordings but from what I have read, you need an engineering degree to operate it. I want something simple to use, that has only a couple of buttons to push, and for that reason the Yeti seems to fit the bill.

Thanks for all your help.

Luke

Luke - Maybe you are not familiar with multitracking (and how it works on the computer) but the Zoom H1, when connected via USB to the Mac, works exactly like other USB mics as an audio source, and you multitrack by recording one track at a time and over-dubbing each new instrument/recording to a NEW track while listening to the recording of your previous tracks. Every USB mic and USB interface or preamp works exactly like this.

The Zoom H4n's 'multitracking' functions are primarily a misnomer in this regard as you are not able to overdub to discreet tracks like in Garageband or like with the older Tascam portastudio cassette recorders, the H4n allows you to record in OMNI mode and have each mic capture it's audio to 4 individual WAV files that are time-synced, or with a MID-SIDE feature that does a left, right and center track, each recorded to an individual time-synced track, or it records a stereo track with whatever gain levels you have set as well as a SECOND 'backup' stereo track with the auto-gain feature and peak-limiter activated just in case your first stereo track has clipping/distortion or is otherwise munged and AS SUCH, all of these extra tracks can be imported into Garageband or even Audacity or any other DAW program, and need to be lined up perfectly in order to be useful, which is actually quite easy to do by looking at the waveforms and matching the audio peaks.

This is all kind of standard practice.

Also to note the ZOOM recorders are STEREO mics, while the Apogee MiC, the Blue Yeti and the iRig Acoustic stage are ALL mono capture and mono output.

Both Garageband and Audacity have great effects that are called 'Spatializer' found in the IMAGING section that do a great job with both mono and stereo recordings to simulate an ambient acoustic space, so having a stereo recording, or a stereo mic setup is not always necessary.

However, I prefer to try and capture the sound from the air as accurately as possible so that I do not have to mess with tons of effects like compression, eq and reverb to 'fix' the recordings. The saying 'garbage in - garbage out' applies here. I all depends upon our workflow but I have found that it's a lot easier and BETTER SOUNDING to have the front-end of your audio setup (i.e., mic, pickup and preamps) to be able to capture as high a fidelity as possible.

As far as the 96k sampling rate -- unless you are only every listening with a $500 pair of Beyerdynamic, Sennheiser, or Grado headphones, most people will NEVER be able to hear the difference between 44.1k, 48k or 96k, especially if everything is mixed down to MP3 files, which do lossy compression regardless of the sample rate or bit rate (320kbps, 256kbps, 160kbps, and 128kbps is considered 'CD quality' by many experts)

Also if folks are listening in tiny earbuds (like that which come with the iPhone, etc) you are never even going to be able to hear much audio below about 200hz in the audio spectrum because these 8mm speaker drivers as simply incapable of producing that deep a frequency range.

Also, to hear the difference with 96k in SPEAKERS, you need something like a decent pair of $500 studio monitors, or some really high-end Hi-Fi setup like Bose, Klipsch, Bang & Olufson, MacIntosh and some other esoteric audiophile brands where a single speaker costs over $1,000 USD. Most people are not doing that and using either their laptop, tablet or smartphone, or earbuds, all of which have serious defecits in reproducing the full audio spectrum of human hearing, all due to the physics of audio.

You cant go wrong with any of these choices, and getting into a recording can be a very deep dive, but it does not HAVE TO be complicated, and we are truly blessed with the choices available now across a wide spectrum of price points.

Hope this helps to clarify. If not, let me know and I will be happy to assist. :)
 
I was at the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet on Sunday, and at one of the uke booths, a guy showed me a little pickup that slipped under the strings in front of the bridge. It worked great there, so I picked on up - only $40, so how wrong could it be?

Rick - are you talking about the Kremona, that goes inside the loops on a tie-bridge?

I saw those, and it's a cool idea, but my concern is the tiny audio jack in the pickup housing, and unless you are VERY careful, it seems like it could be easily broken if the audio cord gets yanked the wrong way.

Also, there is at least SOME (somtimes a big) difference in the resulting sound captured by any kind of mic that essentially converts air pressure to electricity vs. any kind of pickup that converts physical vibration from the wood surface of the instrument into electricity that both ways, gets converted back into sound for amplification or recording.

Part of this difference is due to IMPEDANCE.

Mics are typically LOW impedance (100 to 1000 ohms) and pickups are usually HIGH impedance (1 million+ ohms) , and when you run a piezo into a guitar amp (typically wants a 10,000 ohm source) or mic input, the QUACKY and thin sound you get, whereby almost all frequencies below 500hz are completely missing and it sounds bad, is due to the IMPEDANCE 'mismatch' and this is why you need a preamp for a pickup to sound 'normal'. The preamp will correct the impedance mismatch and then everything just works.

The high impedance of pickups, results also in very HIGH capacitance, which in effect and by it's very nature acts like a shelving eq or 'high-pass filter' that is electrically blocking out all the mid-bass and bass frequencies...

It's kind of like trying to use a 3v battery in a device that is designed for 12v, the 3v battery just does not have 'enough' to meet the expectations of the device it is connected to that needs 12v.

Hope this helps. If not let me know and I will be happy to assist further. :)
 
Luke - Maybe you are not familiar with multitracking (and how it works on the computer) but the Zoom H1, when connected via USB to the Mac, works exactly like other USB mics as an audio source, and you multitrack by recording one track at a time and over-dubbing each new instrument/recording to a NEW track while listening to the recording of your previous tracks. Every USB mic and USB interface or preamp works exactly like this.

The Zoom H4n's 'multitracking' functions are primarily a misnomer in this regard as you are not able to overdub to discreet tracks like in Garageband or like with the older Tascam portastudio cassette recorders, the H4n allows you to record in OMNI mode and have each mic capture it's audio to 4 individual WAV files that are time-synced, or with a MID-SIDE feature that does a left, right and center track, each recorded to an individual time-synced track, or it records a stereo track with whatever gain levels you have set as well as a SECOND 'backup' stereo track with the auto-gain feature and peak-limiter activated just in case your first stereo track has clipping/distortion or is otherwise munged and AS SUCH, all of these extra tracks can be imported into Garageband or even Audacity or any other DAW program, and need to be lined up perfectly in order to be useful, which is actually quite easy to do by looking at the waveforms and matching the audio peaks.

This is all kind of standard practice.

Also to note the ZOOM recorders are STEREO mics, while the Apogee MiC, the Blue Yeti and the iRig Acoustic stage are ALL mono capture and mono output.

Thanks again Booli for educating me. I am a novice when it comes to recording. I was not aware there was a difference between multi-tracking and over-dubbing. My goal is to over-dub my ukulele, voice, bass guitar, and steel guitar tracks. I was also not aware that the Zooms are stereo and the other mics are mono.
 
Thanks again Booli for educating me. I am a novice when it comes to recording. I was not aware there was a difference between multi-tracking and over-dubbing. My goal is to over-dub my ukulele, voice, bass guitar, and steel guitar tracks. I was also not aware that the Zooms are stereo and the other mics are mono.

Thank you. I am glad to help.

Keep in mind that stereo mics are usually better either for capturing more of the room ambience or for capturing a group as with an omni-directional mic. The Yeti is a 'multi pattern mic' in that it has a uni-directional mode (cardioid), omni-directional as well as a figure-eight mode, mainly for capturing 2 sources, like in a podcast interview, or 2 musicians on opposite sides of the mic but the output of the figure-eight mode is combined into a mono output signal.

The Apogee Mic is cardioid, and what cardioid means is that the mic is most sensitive in one direction only and will 'reject' most of the sound from behind it and/or reflected ambient sound, and is better for isolation of a single audio source (like voice or guitar) and is most useful positioned 6-10 inches from the audio source, as opposed to am 'omni' mic which is sensitive in all directions and will pick up literally everything, including reflections, air conditioners, barking dogs, passing trucks much more so than a cardioid 'uni-directional' mic.

The iRig Acoustic Stage has a special kind of mic called a MEMS mic (similar in some ways to an electret mic), which is essentially omni-directional, but because it is placed on the edge of the sound hole, due to the proximity of the sound coming from the uke/guitar, will respond more like a cardioid mic and is designed to be more of a point-source transducer due to it's mounting and placement method so close to and almost inside the instrument.

There are ALSO 'binaural' microphones that are usually embedded into earbuds or headphones, and the design and use of these mics are to simulate what a person actually hears with their own ears, and your head acts as a sort of buffer which causes miniscule time-delays in the sound waves reaching your ear drum, and audio recorded with binaural mics are considered to most accurately represent that actual sound that the musician hears when playing the instrument. Almost like an audio version of virtual reality.

The experience tends to sound more realistic than X/Y or A/B (orthagonal) stereo mics, especially when listened back with headphones. There are ways to simulate binaural experience during playback playback by using various effects during production after the recordings, and this can even be done with recordings that were a mono source, by introducing minute delays to each left and right channel as well as having a slightly different eq for the left vs. right channel. Doing these manipulations can trick our hearing perception to have a sense of more 'space' and 'air' in the recording. There is a whole field of science and audio called 'psycho-acoustics' that goes into all this in great detail.

I have not mastered it all yet, but it is fun to play with at home and be able to create, and hear the differences with different equipment, and with different production workflows.
 
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Great explanation, as always, Booli. It's not exactly a Kremona, from the looks of it - it goes in front of the bridge under the strings.

Like I said, it sounded good at the Swap Meet - have not tested it at home yet. I'll let you know when I do - the LdfM that I got a month ago does not have a pickup, so I thought this might be a patchwork solution. And a high pass filter might be just the trick for my Collings <g>.
 
Great explanation, as always, Booli. It's not exactly a Kremona, from the looks of it - it goes in front of the bridge under the strings.

Like I said, it sounded good at the Swap Meet - have not tested it at home yet. I'll let you know when I do - the LdfM that I got a month ago does not have a pickup, so I thought this might be a patchwork solution. And a high pass filter might be just the trick for my Collings <g>.

Thanks for the reply Rick.

Is it possible you could share the name and model of this pickup and also share a photo? I am intrigued.

The Kremona I am speaking of looks like this:

_DSC0635.JPG


_DSC0637.JPG


_DSC0638.JPG


(NOTE: photos used without permission from http://gotaukulele.com, and BazMaz has a great review of the Kremona pickup here)

There's nothing wrong with using an external pickup, some folks like to use them.

I know you were joking with the <g>, but does the Collings uke have a boomy bass response?

one bad enough that you have to eq the mid-bass and bass to zero?

Because that is what happens due to the impedance mismatch.

A high-pass filter, passes ONLY the higher frequencies and nothing at all below the cutoff point, and a low-pass filter is the opposite, passing ONLY the lower frequencies and nothing above the cutoff point.

Also just for FYI - a BANDPASS filter is like a combo of both high-pass and low-pass in that it blocks on both sides and only passes the frequencies IN BETWEEN the cutoff points, sort of like a mid-pass filter but nobody calls it that, at least that I've seen.
 
I'll post a picture next week when I get some time. There is no brand name on the unit - the guy at the Market claimed he had them named himself.

And my bad - I was confusing hi-pass and low-pass. My Collings is quite trebley, which is nice for some songs and with re-entrant tuning, and it does play like a dream.
 
I'll post a picture next week when I get some time. There is no brand name on the unit - the guy at the Market claimed he had them named himself.

And my bad - I was confusing hi-pass and low-pass. My Collings is quite trebley, which is nice for some songs and with re-entrant tuning, and it does play like a dream.

No worries. It will be cool to see what else is out there vs. the more common types of pickups in the mainstream.

BTW- Years ago I used to love going to flea markets, as there were always interesting things to find that often you would not see for sale anywhere else, but I've just not had the time or the money these days. Mostly Craigslist and eBay have filled that curiosity for now...:)
 
Also to note the ZOOM recorders are STEREO mics, while the Apogee MiC, the Blue Yeti and the iRig Acoustic stage are ALL mono capture and mono output.

Both Garageband and Audacity have great effects that are called 'Spatializer' found in the IMAGING section that do a great job with both mono and stereo recordings to simulate an ambient acoustic space, so having a stereo recording, or a stereo mic setup is not always necessary.

It was my impression that the Blue Yeti was one of the very few USB mikes actually capable of stereo recording?
I might get it wrong.
I remember being very close to getting one last year, but the fact that it was the size of a forearm put me off. Ended up getting a Shure MV5 mic, which is probably inferior, but takes up less space on the desk.

I also remember trying to record with my wife's old H2 recorder. Apparently connecting them with a USB cable is not all that plug and play. There was no sound coming through, don't know if the drivers for that edition just hadn't been updated. That might be a catch to H2s, driver problems.
 
Yes, the blue yeti has 4 settings - one of which is stereo so I'm hoping that stereo means stereo because I just ordered one!
And I previously have been using the mics from my Zoom H4, patched into my laptop as previously described. I think they work well, but my main gripe has been that I can't get it close enough to my instrument without it being in the video shot. Maybe I need to sit on a stool or something. I also bought an adjustable boom so I hope it's going to solve some of those problems.
 
Yes, the blue yeti has 4 settings - one of which is stereo so I'm hoping that stereo means stereo because I just ordered one!
And I previously have been using the mics from my Zoom H4, patched into my laptop as previously described. I think they work well, but my main gripe has been that I can't get it close enough to my instrument without it being in the video shot. Maybe I need to sit on a stool or something. I also bought an adjustable boom so I hope it's going to solve some of those problems.

I bought one a few weeks ago, when I saw one at a huge discount.
It has a stereo setting!
And it records very clearly.
 
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