Blue Mouse Microphone

 

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Blue Mouse

Blue Microphones are relative newcomers into the mic market but have quickly established themselves as an innovative mic manufacture with very distinctive styling and deliberately contoured sounding microphones. Founded in 1995 by Skipper Wise and Martins Saulespurens, Blue is based in California but the mics are manufactured and assembled in Latvia (Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics) The Mouse is a cardioid condenser which employs a hand-built single-membrane, large diaphragm capsule enclosed within a rotating spherical grill so that the capsule can be positioned and adjusted in the smallest of spaces and I bought a mouse earlier last year specifically for Kick drum duties to replace our increasingly ageing Neumann U47.

Recording

In keeping with the principle that there aren't really many bad mics around but that some are better at certain things than others, the Blue Mouse has caused me some real head scratching in the studio. At over a thousand pounds list it was a seriously expensive mic and we thought long and hard before investing but were convinced by the number of positive reviews on the internet. We have an old 47fet which still gets put at the business end of kick drums and we thought that we might retire it to less arduous work. As soon as the mic arrived we tried it infront of the kick with a number of other mics and it was immediately obvious that we would have problems. The mic is seriously affected by popping and overloaded every preamp we used until we plugged it into the Focusrite 1sa 428 with an industrial standard pop shield. Even then comparing it to our other test mics it really didn't do it for us as a kick mic. The top end is very bright and hard and to me the bottom sounded flabby and confused. Not a good start!.
Doing some more research it turns out that the Mouse comes in two versions with different output circuitries— transformer and transformerless. The transformer version is matte black while the transformerless version that we bought is finished in a dark royal blue and of course the rave reviews for kick drum were with the black transformer version. Since then we have tried the mic out on numerous different sessions and while it's a good solid quiet mic I've not really found anything that it does better than our other studio mics though I have recently spoken to an engineer that uses a pair for drum O/Hs and he loves them!. As ever it's all down to personal preference but for me the Blue Mouse is just too expensive for what it does and if I want that sound then I can always EQ another decent mic. It's beautifully engineered and not a bad mic per se as it works well and quietly and of course it looks really great but for me it's a case of style over performance..

Recently the mic has tumbled in price in the UK coming down to £600. I don't usually sell mics but I moved mine along on Ebay and I got £300 from a guy in Italy which is a decent price for an interesting looking and sounding condenser mic. And my lesson to me is........ Hire a microphone for a few days and try it out before buying one.

 
Microphones and recording 2008. Blue Mouse