TONE

@edcyn: Small world; the Guitar Center in Sherman Oaks was only a 1/4 mile from the apartment I lived in during the 90's, and I was in there pretty regularly.

The SM58 is the industry standard mic for live vocals, but not for recording them. The Telefunken U47 (tube) is still the gold standard, but rare and expensive. A lot of studios have the solid state Telefunken, the U67.

@edcyn: For voice recording, the Shure SM58 (or 57) is not a good choice of microphone. Those mics have a presence peak deliberately engineered in, to make vocals cut through the sound of instruments coming out of a PA system.

The SM57 is very popular in recording studios for use on snare drums, but never, ever vocals. For vocals, get yourself a Telefunken U47 (tube powered). One will set you back more than the price of your car. ;-)

I made recordings of my young son’s voice with a nice small-capsule omni condenser mic plugged directly into a Revox A77 Mk.3, as well as a pair to record a band featuring acoustic piano, drumset, saxes, Jazz-tone guitar (a fat-bodied Gibson plugged into a small combo amp), electric bass, and vocalist. I’ve used those tapes for years, as demo source material

Make your own music recordings! Borrow or rent a pair of good mics and a reel-to-reel recorder, and ask a musician friend (you do have them, right?) if you can record a live performance. Once the tape is rolling, listen intently to the music and the sound. Then listen to the recording at home, comparing the sound you heard with the sound your system is producing.

Another great thing to record is the human voice. We are all very familiar with that sound, and any "vowel" coloration (as J. Gordon Holt put it) will be glaringly obvious. WARNING: Most loudspeakers fail this demanding test. The QUAD ESL (introduced in 1957!) excelled in reproducing singing voices, setting a standard few other speakers to this day can match.

If you are new to live recording, you may need to take a few stabs at it before you seem to have captured the sound fairly accurately. The catch-22 is that the only way to evaluate the tape is to listen to it on a system, the very thing you are trying to determine the tonal accuracy of!

If that sounds like more than you want to take on, use recordings known for having life-like tonal characteristics. Known superior recordings in that regard are those on the Water Lily Records. Try A Meeting On The River, featuring the guitar playing of Ry Cooder.