When MacLean heard about the new DPA 4099 he was very keen to try it out, and finally found a mic that could do justice to his acoustic violin playing.
After 25 years of searching, violinist Nigel MacLean has found a great solution to amplifying his violin – the new DPA 4099 instrument mic, purchased from his local distributor in Australia, Amber Technology.
Having decided to learn jazz and other genres in addition to orchestral work, MacLean needed a pickup for his violin, but kept running into problems with reproducing the top end and low mids, and also picking up other sounds on stage and amplifying them through the system. “All the monitor engineers can do is shake their head and turn you down,” he remembers. “I just wanted to play and not have to do dodgy things to my violin like winding gaffer around the bridge. It’s hard to get in the vibe when you have to root yourself to one spot and not move in fear of feedback.” Ultimately his search proved so fruitless that he made an executive decision to proceed in his career with an electric violin.
“Electric violins are great but like the guitar are best used for certain genres,” he says. They require preamps and consideration to equalisation but don’t give you any headaches when it comes to feedback. The acoustic violin was designed to be heard best from at 6-10 feet away, preferably in a nice big room that amplified its sound. The sound heard by the player is not the same sound heard from a distance. A great Italian violin teacher used tell me, ‘The sound is up there, not down here!’ This is the tone I am looking to reproduce when playing live on the acoustic, but the reality of amplifying a four-string violin is that you are only playing between 100hz and 13khz on the frequency spectrum.”
When MacLean heard about the new DPA 4099 he was very keen to try it out, and finally found a mic that could do justice to his acoustic violin playing.
“DPA has really got it right,” he says. “The 4099 mic clips easily to the bouts of the violin, there are rubber mounts to protect the instrument and the gooseneck gives the much-needed height off the instrument. The gooseneck is flexible in all directions and allows the player to adjust the mic to the desired angle. The tone is that of my instrument: pure and simple. The rejection of external sound is truly amazing, and there are no lumps in the frequency response!”
MacLean is employing the 4099 in exactly the way DPA envisaged musicians would when they designed it; touring with the mic as an adjunct to their valuable instruments to ensure the best possible sound reproduction at all venues.
“I recently toured with Kate Ceberano on the Simply Red Australian tour and for the first time in my life was excited about the sound coming back at me through the foldback,” says MacLean. “Now I am keen to be playing my acoustic again live. To finally have a microphone that has taken all of these things into consideration has literally changed my life. DPA has done all the R&D required so I can now just plug and play, and it makes such a difference to playing when you’re turned on by the sound.”