DAN AGOSTO: Hello fellow gearheads. My name is Dan Agosto, and you're watching a screencast from Gearwire.Com, and in this screencast we're talking about the Shure Green Bullet. It's a harmonica microphone but it can be used for so much else. In this particular video, we're going to be taking a listen to it recording guitar, and in this case rhythm guitar. Now, I really feel that it excels at recording sort of a lo-fi vintage rhythm guitar sound.

Helping us out with that task will be the Fender Champion 600, class A tube amp, 5 watts, and the Gibson SG circa 1997, totally vintage. And so, the settings on the Fender are shown. It's going to distort a little bit. I'm going to back off on the SG's volume just a little bit to keep it at bay.

And now, this Green Bullet mic, it's a little bit of a weirdo. There's a volume knob on it. I usually keep that all the way up, and it's got an attached cable that goes to a high-impedance 1/4" output, kind of like what you'd use with guitar, and in fact this is usually plugged into guitar amps. And another thing that kind of makes it a little bit wonky is there's no way to mount it on a mic stand, so you kind of have to take matters into your own hands, and what I like to do is take the instrument connector and feed it through the strap of the amp, and feed it all the way through and this time around I'm plugging it in to the Avalon VT-737SP, sort of a high-end piece and it's kind of nice to put a lo-fi piece through a high-end piece I think. It's going into the instrument input.

So, I feed the whole length of the wire, the cable, through the strap of the amp or the handle of the amp, and sort of pull it through so that the mic is positioned more or less at the voice coil. After you've pulled it all the way through, you're going to want to put a weight on top of the amp to hold the cord in place and you can use pretty much anything for that.

So anyway, let's get to the sound for that we have here. This is, of course, the SG as I said, and it's going to sound a bit lo-fi and that's because it only hears up to about 5k, so let's give it a listen. Here it comes.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK RHYTHM GUITAR TRACK RECORDED WITH THE SHURE GREEN BULLET]

I'll go ahead and turn that up a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK RHYTHM GUITAR TRACK RECORDED WITH THE SHURE GREEN BULLET]

Now, if it sounds like an old, junkie guitar through an old junkie amp, that's actually sort of by design in my book. Well, let's just go ahead and listen to it with the rest of the mix because then you'll really see what role it plays. So here it comes and enjoy.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK RHYTHM GUITAR TRACK RECORDED WITH THE SHURE GREEN BULLET ALONG WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

So, you can hear how it kinds of sits there in the mix. There's the other electric guitar panned center that's a bit twangier and hi-fi but this one plays a supporting role. It sort of sits there along with our piano and along with our acoustic guitars and creates the base upon which everything else is sort of built upon. I'm going to go ahead and turn that down to where I have it during the actual mix. It's somewhere around here. Now, you can still hear it. It's still there. It's still doing what it needs to do but it's just not there and it's not crowding any of the other instruments out of the way and just leaves everything open.

That's what I like -- That's one application that I like this microphone for. I think it does really well and you can count on it time and time again, really with -- I've tried it with a few different amps and it usually works quite nicely. The other application for this microphone that I find pretty nice is distorting vocals. Instead of, you know, mic'ing -- using a U87 or whatever your favorite vocal mic to record your singer through your favorite preamp, plug this mic into an amplifier and then mic that up, and it's a great way to get lo-fi or just a different type of vocal, distorted vocals, and stuff like that. So, thanks for checking out this video.