Help me choose a quality, studio vocal mic

Hi everyone -
I'm still piecing together my home "mini" studio and am now ready to purchase a quality, studio vocal mic or two.
I'd like to keep the budget at $500 or less, including used. Should I purchase two vocal mics for home studio recording? I have a simple iMac and will probably purchase a Presonus Firebox soon (or Saffire).
I LOVE the way the SM58 sounds in a live setting but I want a mic that is made for the studio.
I'm also going to get an additional SM57 to record my acoustic guitar - 2 SM57s for an acoustic, what do you think? I've read that's the best setup...
Oh and what about the circular "shield" for the vocal mic? Sorry for the lack of terminology but I'm new to this . What brand of that would you recommend?

I'd like to keep the budget at $500 or less, including used.
I've been very happy with the Shure Condensor I use. I forget the exact model, but it's like this one:
http://www.zzounds.com/item--SHUBETA87A
Which is well within your budget.
Should I purchase two vocal mics for home studio recording?
I use a single mic for vocal and electric guitar recording. I generally use two on the acoustic (an SM57 and the condensor)
will probably purchase a Presonus Firebox soon (or Saffire).
You should be very happy with the FireBox. I use the FirePod and am extremely pleased with the quality. PResonus has a very good rep here, both for theeir equipment as well as their support.
Oh and what about the circular "shield" for the vocal mic?
A defuser, or simply "Pop Filter". I can't imagine any advantage of one brand over another. They are very simple devices, but very good to have.
--HangTime [Will Compute for Food] B-)>

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I am trying to record my vocals and piano simultaneously. I'm using the MBox 2, with Adobe Audition 3.0. Whenever I add reverb to my vocal track (via the fx tab under my vocal track in multi track view), it affects the way my piano sounds while I am recording (it creates a delay on the sound of the keyboard while I am playing...almost like a 'bouncing note' delay). I really want to be able to hear some reverb on my voice while recording, but I cannot seem to figure out how to do it. This is how I have everything set up:
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Hello Brian,
Thanks for your help again. I have spent the last 6 hours running into nothing but problems. I tried your advice about recording mono in both separate tracks, and still no luck. I was using a condenser mic, and a keyboard. Both using mono, and I was using the studio reverb. I finally decided to try something simpler, just so I could at least feel a bit satisfied in getting a recording in. I set the condenser mic near my keyboard and speakers, and plugged my keyboard into the speakers. I armed the one mic track for record for phantom power, applied studio reverb, and set up the correct settings for the track by going into Audio Hardware Setup and selecting 'Asio Digidesign Driver' as the audio driver for everything. I simply wanted to play my piano, which would sound through the monitors next to me, and sing into the microphone..which would pick up my vocals with the piano in the background. The only way I could hear reverb on my voice during the recording, was by adjusting the 'mix' knob on the front of the mbox. It seemed to be working okay, and I thought I had found at least a compromise for the moment. But after saving the files, and upon listening to them...I noticed drops and rises/glitches/ in the recording volume. I then did a bunch of tests. I recorded some without any reverb assigned at all, did some recordings with the mix knob up and some with it off...I tried everything I could think of. I saved each one as a wav file, and MP3, just to see if that would affect the sound. Listening to them, they all have those same sound glitches. While doing the recordings, the sound disturbances weren't audible.
I am wondering if there is a setting that I need to fix...I am not the most savvy technical person, and am rather new to recording. Maybe the buffer size needs to be adjusted? I really have no idea...it is frustrating. I should say that I am using an MBox 2, which is supposed to be used with Pro Tools software. I had problems using Pro Tools as well, I don't think my OS is very compatible with it. Unfortunately, I have windows Vista, which I hear nothing but problems about in regards to recording. I prefer to use Adobe Audition, as I'm familiar with it, and like it.
Well, I hope this email hasn't put you to sleep. I really hope I can get this figured out, as I'm keen to record.
Thank you again..
Best,
Jenny Jo
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 00:35:03 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Is it possible to add reverb to vocal mic, without affecting my keyboard sound?
Out of some disbelief I had to try my own setup suggestion from above, since it's not a thing I do daily anymore. Without wanting to go into any dispute with the above poster, I can only say:
It works well here.
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Setting up two mono tracks with a separate input to each, I was able to record vocals with reverb from Audition in my monitoring headphones, along with recording an electro-acoustic instrument (guitar in my case) on the adjacent track with no reverb at all. I sang/tested with lots of consonants and different monitor levels and reverbs; I used the Studio Reverb, which is the least CPU intensive and recommended in the manual. There was no noticable delay, echo, what have you, which I felt disturbed my precision at all. Now I KNOW technically there is a delay/latency, but for practical purposes it isn't noticable. I've also heard some singers are extremely pecky on this, and for them there is the solution of direct monitoring and an outboard reverb added to their headphone signal. For everyone else however it works well and the latency just a theory - certainly not an audible 'echo' of any kind. With a poor soundcard and a computer low on resources latency will become evident. Also if you don't use ASIO. This type of application is why we have ASIO.
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