Take control of your Shure MV88 microphone

The Essential and Nice to Have settings at your fingertips

This article is part of my guide to recording your piano at home.

More and more people are enjoying recording themselves playing Piano and sharing on social media. This is either for advice from other pianists or just for the sheer hell of it.  An external Microphone has proved to me to be a cool investment.  Today I’d like to do a deep dive into how you can get the most from using one when recording your piano. 

I’ve written about the microphone I chose previously.  It’s the Shure MV88 and is good option if you want a nice and simple recording set up using just your Smartphone.  

Shure MV88 Digital Stereo Condenser Microphone

A compact, high-quality stereo microphone designed for mobile recording, offering multiple polar patterns and excellent sound clarity for musicians and content creators.

Without getting too technical, the Shure MV88 is what’s known as a Condenser Microphone.  Condenser microphones are very common in recording studios as they are very sensitive to sound.  This particular model was created especially for iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). 

Shure MV88+ Video Making Kit

Since then, Shure released the MV88+ which, whilst slightly more expensive, comes as a ‘video making’ kit including small tripod and is compatible with Android phones as well as iOS.



I actually now have both the MV88 and MV88+ (my new iPad USB-C was not compatible with the lightening connector on the MV88).  If you’re interested to learn how they sound side by side, you can watch the shoot-out video on my YouTube channel.

One Hidden Benefit

Before we jump into the settings. I’d just like to highlight that when we have a Shure MV88 or MV88+, we can effectively turn our phone into a dedicated recording device. This gives us the incredibly powerful option of recording audio and video separately as I explain in this article.

This is much easier to do than you might think and really unlocks great advantages both for our audio and our video.

Usable ‘Plug and Play’

As with many things, these microphones are largely plug and play.  You get a dramatic improvement without really doing much more. 

However, there are a couple of setting that we absolutely need to understand and change to suit us. The first of these is to make sure we capture a Stereo Recording (as this microphone can also capture Mono).

Stereo recording

Stereo is where you have the sound distributed from the left, through the centre and then over to the right.  You’ll notice this specifically with headphones when certain sounds seem louder towards the left, others louder towards the right and others appearing to come from directly in front of you. With good quality speakers well placed at home you can also hear this effect.

To make this possible, the MV88/MV88+ have the capability to pick up sound from three different places – the centre, the left and then the right.  This is why we have the L and the R on the microphone casing.  This comes in handy when recording your piano for Social media as most people will listen to your recordings using headphones – and so a nice stereo sound is what they’ll be subconsciously expecting.

Effectively, you can set it to pick up sound mainly from in front of the microphone, and then also supplement it with sound from the left and the right.  The Microphone then converts this into two Stereo channels automatically.

The simplest way to do this is to choose from one of the ‘Band Modes’.  They might not always be ideal as of course every recording situation is different.  However, they will almost always represent a great starting point that you can fine tune afterwards if you need to.

The Band Modes are:

• speech 
• singing 
• acoustic instrument 
• loud
• flat (minimal settings)

The clue is, as they say, is in the title. I personally started from the Acoustic Instrument preset.

The next thing we need to modify is the sensitivity of the microphone – which is called the Gain

Microphone Gain

A Piano can produce anything from extremely loud sounds to delicate pianissimos.  This wide range can cause real problems for any microphone.

To help with this, we need to set what is known as the ‘Mic Gain’.  The Gain is in a way the opposite to Volume.  If you are recording a very loud sound, then you will need to set the gain quite low, whereas to record a very quiet sound, you will need to set the gain much higher.  The challenge with the piano of course is that you can have both and everything in between.

You’ll likely need to ‘phone a friend’ to help you set the gain.  It’s not difficult to do, however, you can’t do it easily alone.  The microphone (and, therefore, your phone) will be positioned somewhere other than where you are sitting to play.

You’ll need your friend to watch the Input Monitors as you play a variety of different volumes.  Your friend can then adjust the Gain on the screen either upwards or downwards.  As a general rule, you want to be as far into the yellow as you can go when you have the loudest sounds (never red).  At the same time, you have to ensure that the monitors register something at the quietest volumes.

This in reality gives us 90% of anything we might need. Once we are set to a Stereo pattern and our gain is correctly set, we’re pretty much good to go.

Settings are Remembered

One thing to point out is that when we choose our Band Mode and set our Gain, these values will be remembered by the microphone. This means, the next time we plug it in, it will use these same settings and also use them with any other App (such as the phone’s Camera App).

The same is true for the advanced features we’re about to look at.

Advanced Features – the Nice to Haves

However, there are many other features that may prove extremely useful when you use the microphone in conjunction with the free Motiv App. 

Monitoring

The Shure MV88 comes with a monitoring cable.  The monitoring cable allows you to plug headphones into your phone at the same time as the microphone. This is so you can ‘monitor’ the sound.

Monitoring is a large topic.  Basically, it allows you to listen to the sound that is picked up by the microphone rather than the actual sound as you hear it in the room.   However, when recording your piano at home, it would be difficult to do properly – even with noise cancelling headphones – so this feature is probably not that helpful to us.  However, if you are plugging your standard headphones into your phone at the same time as the microphone, then use this cable as it will automatically disable the built in microphone on the headphones.

Settings within the Band Modes

Once we have selected our Band Mode (the Acoustic Instrument), there are also other settings that we can modify too.

• The Stereo Width
• Equalisation; and
• Compression
• Limiter

Let’s take each these in turn

Stereo Width

Stereo Width basically defines how wide an area directly in front of the microphone from which it will pick up sound.

A wide setting would look like this for example:

A narrow setting would look more like this:

So, if we use the ‘Speech’ preset, it has a ‘narrow’ stereo width as it assumes you are only trying to only pick up sound directly in front of the microphone.  This way the microphone will try to ‘reject’ any sound coming from the left, right or behind.  If on the other hand we use the Loud setting (ideal for live bands for example), then it will use a wide stereo width to capture sounds coming from a wider area in front of the microphone.  Of course, in this setting we usually have instruments to the left, right and centre.

We might wasn’t to modify this slightly depending on where our microphone is placed with respect to the piano.

Equalisation

The second main setting is the Equalisation.  I explained this at some length in my post about the easy way to add EQ to a recording using Garageband.  

As a quick reminder, you can use Equalisation to either boost or lower certain frequencies depending on the type of sound you are recording.  You are able to modify this directly within the Shure Motiv App.

High Pass Filter

A High Pass Filter is used to effectively cut off very low sounds so that they don’t get into our recording. With piano, this probably isn’t a great idea as it has very low sounds itself.

Compression

The final setting is Compression.  This is a topic I haven’t covered before and it’s actually both extremely simple and extremely complex at the same time if that makes any sense at all !! 

Basically, what compression tries to do is compensate for big changes in volume within the same recording.  So, for example, if you have somebody who is both whispering and shouting in the same recording, you might want to make the whispered sections ever so slightly louder so that they can be heard better whilst at the same time making the shouted sections ever so slightly quieter so as not to hurt someone’s ears when they’re listening back.  For we enthusiastic amateurs, as always I recommend using pre-sets here so we don’t need to necessarily understand all of the technical detail behind what is going on.

Polar Pattern

The App also allows you to change the Polar Pattern.  For recording your piano, you only really need the ‘Stereo’ polar pattern (which means the microphone will pick up from in front and from the sides.   You can set it to pick up a Mono signal (so it switches off the sides) or a Bidirectional signal (so it switches off the front). These might come in handy if you want to use it for something other than just recording piano or wanted the piano to sound more vintage.

Limiter

Finally, the microphone has a Limiter.  The Limiter works a little like the Compression setting except that the Limiter simply Limits the volume of louder sounds without making quieter ones louder.  However, don’t try to use this setting as a way of not correctly setting the gain as we discussed above.

Conclusion

So, now you know how to really dive deep into this fabulous microphone’s settings.

Remember that we can also record audio directly into the MOTIV App and then use this for when we want to record Audio and Video separately (a real advantage).

For more information on Recording your piano at home, you’ll find this in my step by step guide.