BLUE Microphones Woodpecker: A Ribbon Mic Made Of Wood
BLUE Microphones Woodpecker is a new ribbon microphone that BLUE wanted to make sure stood out from other modern ribbon mics that seem to be coming out to satisfy a curious audience interested in the ribbon mic fad. BLUE managed to put out a mic made out of wood that still delivered exceptional clarity and performance.
Just watch out for actual woodpeckers.
JAIME ENDICK: Hi, Jaime Endick with Gearwire.Com here with Skipper Wise at Blue Microphones, and we're going to be looking at the Woodpecker now. Tell us a little bit about the Woodpecker.
SKIPPER WISE: Well, the Woodpecker is a ribbon mic, and ribbons have become a kind of a faddish thing right? Everybody's sort of interested in them. When I was younger, and I used to make records for a living, I used to collect ribbon microphones, and the old ribbon mics from yesterday there were a lot of RCAs, a lot of Lomo mics out of Russia I used to have and various other companies, and they all exhibited a certain sound that worked for me in certain applications, but as technology has changed, they didn't seem to have the top end that I was looking for for modern recording, and not only that. There's a lot of people who pay homage to the past and put out current products that really do it quite well. So, when my partner Martin said he wanted to put a ribbon mic offering in our line, I said, "...only if we can do something different", because that's what we're about at Blue. There's no reason to sort of copy what somebody else has done. We'll just be a great imitation even if we did it better. So, he kept for about two years, sending me over various samples of the Woodpecker. Before it was called the Woodpecker, it was actually on a metal body with various ribbons and sounds, and I kept rejecting them saying, "I don't think so. I don't think we're ever going to get this right," and then about a year ago he sent m something I fell in love with, and it had the clarity and the top end, and at that point then the design guys, myself, Ken, one of the other gentlemen that we worked with, we're designing what to work to create the visual aspect of what you see here. And wood is something we've always wanted to work with so the name Woodpecker became a proper name to along with the mic. We also had a tag line. We had a contest. One was "Timber," which was done Ken Niles, our art director; he won the tag line there, and then, "I had got wood," which has been used in some of our trades.
JAIME ENDICK: well, thank you so much, Skipper for showing us your beautiful microphones.
SKIPPER WISE: Thank you so much.
JAIME ENDICK: Thank you for watching Gearwire.Com.
SKIPPER WISE: We'll see you on the internet.
JAIME ENDICK: Yes.
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