Today’s guest is engineer, audio technician, and microphone designer Derek Bargaehr. Derek is the the Chief Everything Officer and co-founder of Vanguard Audio Labs. He created Vanguard to give musicians and recording engineers access to great and affordable tools and since then his mics have been added to mic lockers all over the world. We have a great chat about microphone design, understanding your tools, using polar patterns and mic placement to change frequency response, and the difference between studying the theory vs learning by doing.
In this episode we'll dig in on...
Voicing Microphones
Not wanting to build clone microphones
Why vintage mics sound different
Reading schematics
Theory vs Execution
Building guitar pedals
Cryogenically freezing components
Noise floor
Using polar pattern and mic placement to adjust frequency response
Building a brand based on word of mouth and guerrilla marketing
Why you should avoid buying new tools until you learn the ones you have