Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, who together form the folk rock duo the Indigo Girls, are on tour again.
With a busy schedule that includes appearances in venues such as the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, CA, the Lincoln Center Performance Hall in Fort Collins, CO, and the House of Blues in Dallas, TX, this act requires consistent results.
When it comes to miking their acoustic guitars, they rely on Periscope Series P30/C microphones from Earthworks.
Brian Speiser, who serves as the Indigo Girls’ FOH (Front of House) Engineer, discussed the challenges of miking the Indigo Girls’ instruments.
“The problem I faced, as all engineers do, was making the pickups in their guitars sound like the front of their guitars, as recorded when they make their albums.”
I experimented with placing different boutique condenser mics in front of their instruments—clamped to their mic stands—but this was quite unsightly from an audience perspective.”
“Even worse, I rarely had enough gain before feedback that would enable me to get the warm wood sound I was looking for.”
“We used to rent various pencil condenser microphones and clamp them to the vocal mic stands,” Speiser continued.
“The girls did a show in Alaska a couple years back and the house had a pair of Earthworks SR30’s. While they were too big for our purposes, I tried them and was absolutely blown away by their capabilities.
“Their cardioid pattern provided so much headroom that I could turn the mics up louder without picking up as much crowd noise or much of the sound from the stage monitors. This discovery led me to investigate what Earthworks options might exist that would deliver comparable performance, but with a low profile form factor, and this led me to the Earthworks P30/C’s.”
“With the tight pattern and full range sound of the P30/C,” Speiser says, “I’m able to get a lot of clean guitar sound with very little bleed from other stage or crowd noise.”
“These mics can barely be seen and with their goosenecks, I’m able to position them closer to the instruments than I’ve ever been able to in the past. I then blend the sound acquired with the P30/C with the sound coming from the guitar pickups. By combining them, I’m able to achieve a guitar sound comparable to those on their recordings.”
“The Earthworks mics have become a huge part of how I mix the Indigo Girls show. As long as I’m mixing them, we will continue to travel with our P30/C’s. Since we started using these mics two years ago, we haven’t done a show without them.”
