The three founding members of English pop girl group Sugababes, Siobhán Donaghy, Mutya Buena, and Keisha Buchanan, have reunited and begun touring under the name MKS.

The group’s FOH engineer Charlie Dale (pictured below), who is also in-house engineer at London’s famous Ronnie Scott’s venue as well as FOH for US rapper Angel Haze, recently decided to start using DPA d:facto II vocal mice across all of these diverse musical endeavours.

"They instantly became my mic of choice for lead vocals, surpassing two big brands I had been using previously," he says. "The d:facto’s mostly flat frequency response until its soft boost at 10 kHz gave me the ability to sculpt a very true representation of the performer’s voice with clear highs so that I don’t have to fight against feedback to pull out, and with all the warm tone one would expect from many jazz vocals."

"With performers, the clarity of the mic is often commented on," Dale adds. "It allows a vocalist to hear the nuances of their vocal and gives them more control, even through loud stage wedges."

Dale’s criteria for an excellent microphone are, he says, clarity, tone, excellent feedback rejection and low off-axis noise. To date, artists who Dale has used DPA’s d:facto with have all been very positive about the microphone, as have other engineers.

"Having a great vocal sound is often the hardest part of the mix, especially on noisy stages, and the d:facto helps on that front by offering a very clear and clean initial signal," he says.

"Its linear off-axis response means that what little bleed there is from wedges and back line is very clear, un-distorted and, most importantly, low-level, allowing me to get a great vocal sound every time, no matter how big or small the room, what the musical style is and how loud the band are."

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Photo by Wunmi Onibudo