Jamie Hill is an American music producer, engineer, and musician. He has produced albums, EPs and songs for music artists including ArnoCorps, KALRI$$IAN (under the alias Tony Highrise), and Shannon Curtis. Hill is also a touring mix engineer with a long list of credits to his name, including Everlast, House Of Pain, La Coka Nostra, The Presets, Elliott Yamin, Matt Nathanson, Nada Surf, Rogue Wave, Jolie Holland and Ed Harcourt.

Jamie Hill

We sat down with Jamie to talk about how he uses the Dragonfly mic to get the best sound:

1. How do you use the Dragonfly?

I’ve been using the Dragonflies as cymbal spot mics lately for some live work. Not as overheads — the act I’m mixing at the moment has a lot of backing tracks, which takes up a considerable amount of space frequency-wise, so I’m finding myself needing to use spot mics with severely band-limited EQs all around the kit in order to leave space in my mix for everything that’s going on. To this end, I’ve been high-passing the Dragonflies at like 3,500 Hz! My goal is to reject as much of the rest of the kit as possible, not to mention the clang-ier parts of the cymbals themselves. I’m just going for that higher-end sheen.

3. In what ways are you using the mic to get the best sound for your  purpose?

I’m using my Dragonflies to capture the high-end sheen of our drummer’s cymbals. In other words, I’m trying to pick up as little of the rest of the kit as possible, and as little stick sound as possible. With that in mind, I’m positioning each Dragonfly over a cymbal pair (left and right), in-between said cymbal pair, at the outside of the kit (on the opposite side of the cymbal from where the drummer hits it). I’m aiming the capsules maybe 10 degrees outward from straight down, and they’re about 26 inches above the cymbals. I’m actually using the cymbals to block the mics’ line of sight from the toms, the better to minimize any spill that I can. The snare still gets in there a bit, but only the top end of it as I’m high-passing the Dragonflies at 3,500 Hz, and the top-end snare spill actually helps the snare poke through the mix a bit, so it all works out well in the end.

Given that, I feel largely unqualified to talk about anything below 3,500 Hz on these mics! From 3,500 cycles up, though, they’re super. The high end is smooth, detailed, and not crispy in the least — even in 25,000-person concrete amphitheaters, which will quickly betray any shrill tendencies a mic might have.

Also, I especially love how the capsule rotates. For live work, this is a life-saver — loosening and tightening a mic stand to hone in on a position is a drag when your console is 125 feet from the sound source! I can just have a stagehand rotate the capsule a bit if need be, and the rest of the mic stays put. Genius.

4. What is your best advice to other artists/producers using this mic?

Get rid of the case it comes with and put it in a case that allows you to leave the shock-mount on!