Founded by four classically-trained musicians, Vox offers its own reinterpretations of rock classics from the likes of Muse, The Rolling Stones and Adele to their local audience in Singapore. To date, the band has appeared at a number of major events, including the Singapore Grand Prix and the Singapore Yacht Show.
Recently they have been fusing classical and rock pieces, such as in ‘Smoke Symphony’ that couples Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Finding the best mics to capture their performances has been difficult, but the band think that they have the solution with DPA Microphones.
‘When we first got started, Vox was pretty much at the mercy of the sound equipment that was used by the equipment hire company chosen by our clients,’ says cellist Tow Huiwen. ‘Instead of giving us wireless instrument microphones they would give us lapel mics that were more suitable for speech. Obviously these were not suited to picking up the sound of our strings. This caused our sound to be metallic and sharp, and was not what we were looking for at all.’
By chance, one of the venue’s fitted the band with DPA d:vote 4099 Instrument Microphones: ‘The ease of fitting the microphones to our instruments and the pick up was fantastic,’ says violinist Justine Loh. ‘We could finally hear the warmth and the natural acoustic of our instruments. After that gig, DPA was always at the top of our minds. We have had the opportunity afterwards to be fitted with many other instrument mics, but the DPA d:vote 4099 stands out from the rest.’
Violinist Lester Kong believes that a mic has to do several things for Vox: ‘As our instruments are acoustic, a mic has to make us sound natural and not metallic and hard,’ he says. ‘It has to provide enough room for the strings and the instrument to vibrate freely. It needs to be easy to fit but we also need to ensure that the way the microphone is fitted does not cause any damage to our instrument, such as scratching the varnish. And lastly it must not get in our way during a performance.’
Vox was supplied with its DPA microphones by the company’s Singapore distributor Uni-DK. ‘We are truly delighted to be using DPA,’ adds violinist Melissa Liew. ‘This means that whatever musical direction we move in, we can have the utmost confidence that the sound heard by the audience is exactly the one that we want to deliver.’
More: www.dpamicrophones.com
