The fit-in-your-palm vintage-looking Tula Mic is retro yet modern. Its extremely small size belies the many features tucked inside. “This thing is tiny,” says Marcel Patillo, creative videographer at Church of the City (COTC) based in greater Nashville, Tenn. “This thing could easily fit in one of my front pockets with no problem, let alone a back pocket or a cargo pocket. And because I know what's packed inside here, I'm still marveling at how they did it. I can't believe I'm saying this, I think this little guy packs more features and pure usability than any microphone I've ever seen,” Patillo says.
"...I love to create and I love that I could take this to one location and do a podcast. Then I could take it to the park with my guitar and record the guitar out there." - Marcel Patillo, Church of the City, Franklin, Tenn.
Tiny but mighty, Patillo says the feel is solid. “It has a vintage look of course, but it almost has like a vintage feel, like sturdy and stable - like you could take a spill and be all right. They have truly gone above and beyond.”
The Tula mic has two capsules, a built-in amp, and its own battery so it doesn’t need to be plugged into an audio interface or anything with phantom power. Patillo uses the Tula for the rest of the video while explaining its many features. First of which is the fact that it can do 12 hours of studio record time in the mic. Down the sides of the mic are several buttons including record, pause, stop, and play. There are also volume rockers, power, input volume, mute, as well as noise control.
“When you hold down the NC button for a few seconds, it'll actually listen to your environment. And once it gets a sense for what your environment sounds like, it'll actually fine-tune the input that you're sending in to actually reduce those noises in the background, which actually works extremely well. So even with noise reduction on or the NC button turned on, it'll give me the raw file and it'll also give me a version with the noise reduced, which is really, really cool,” Patillo adds.
Lastly, there’s an omnidirectional button for recording 360 degrees around the mic for gathering sound effects or room sound – or you can leave it in cardioid mode for recording right in front of the mic. Patillo gushes, “I have fallen in love with this mic. I have fallen head over heels because I love to create and I love that I could take this to one location and, and do a podcast. Then I could take it to the park with my guitar and record the guitar out there. And you can sing into this thing and it actually sounds great. Or you can just have it record the room or environments you're in or collect sound effects, all in this tiny package.”
Patillo will be using the Tula mic for live podcasts at the Capture Summit in early August because not only can it record standalone - you can also plug it into a computer and use it as an audio input just like any other USB plugin microphone. “It's like the one thing that you want to have with you at all times because it can do all things at all times when it comes to recording or audio,” Patillo concludes.
