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i've got my 'jam room' basically set up the way i think is most conducive to jamming/playing, and the last few weeks i've been hitting some roadblocks as far as playing in a band setting (ie too many little dicks on the little dance floor). last night i stripped it all back down to just me, the jagmaster, my peavey xxx, a ds-1/tuner/chorus, and my musical soul-mate, my best friend & drummer.

we finally got passed said hump, and hammered out a nice energetic rendition of a song we've been toying with for quite sometime, and now we want to record it. since i've moved twice in 2009, and twice in 2008, i've lost several things i consider integral to capturing the sound into my recorder (fostex dmt-8vl):

2 sm58's (one run over accidentally, one stolen(?))
1 sm57 (stolen)
2 peavey sm58 knock offs (dunno what happened to them, but they were very nice)
several mic cords & stands

i have no mics, and recently purchased an amp mic stand, and nice hosa cables. i'll be replacing the 57 for amp/demo's asap, but i'm looking for something i can put in the corners to capture everything, trying to maintain as much definition as possible. something quick, and dirty.

i was thinking one in the middle, and two in the corners that aren't occupied by doors, or equipment being played.

sorry this is so long/descriptive (maybe not?), but is there a good all around mic for capturing the music played live in a room, yet not suited for anything in particular?

I think a great all around mic is the CAD M179 and it's cheap, 130$. Its got 5 polar patterns I believe and it does everything pretty well. It's a good room mic, great on toms, decent on bass drum, good on acoustic and guitar cabs. You can pretty much do anything with it and it'll sound decent at least to very good. Definitely check one out.

You know those little mics people clip on their ties on TV? A mic like that would be a good. I can't remember what they're called but they're omni-directional (usually anyway) and you can get them with a fairly flat frequency response across a large range. Buy that sort of mic but not specifically made for speech and you'll be golden.

James wrote:You know those little mics people clip on their ties on TV? A mic like that would be a good. I can't remember what they're called but they're omni-directional (usually anyway) and you can get them with a fairly flat frequency response across a large range. Buy that sort of mic but not specifically made for speech and you'll be golden.

They're called lapel mics. I use one at work for video stuff all of the time and would be surprised if that got good results, but then again the levels are always set up to to only record the voice of the person whose mouth is 6 inches away.

I've gotten good(ish... err almost acceptable) results with a Zoom H2 in the middle of the room. Needs EQing afterwards for hihats/crashes though.