Guitar Gear Forum

I have an older Focusrite Octopre Platnum that sounds amazing but the mic pres are very hot. So hot that I can't use it for drums/loud guitar because none of the preamps have pads

So I decided to build myself a 1u 8 channel mic pad strip. But before dropping to coin to get all the parts to build that I decided to test the circuit to make sure it was transparent. I built the pad circuit inside the connector of a shitty mic cable I had laying around. It works great. I get about 10db of reduction with very little change in sound.

Check out the clip below. First is unpadded. I dropped the volume of the unpadded to match the padded. The padded seems just a hair brighter, but that could just be from me unplugging the cable and plugging in the pad.

https://soundcloud.com/ejendres/mic-pad-test

It was crazy easy to build and I'm really happy with the results, I'll post a build thread for the full assembly when I start it.

Are you going to make the final product with pots so it's adjustable?

mamberg wrote:Are you going to make the final product with pots so it's adjustable?

nah, -10db fixed pad

That's cool shit!


Yeah, I think I hear more definition with the pad on.


I bought an inline mic booster a couple months ago. It's pretty badass; it'll wake the fuck up out of a low output mic. It's cool to use on any dynamic just for a slightly different flavor, too

Devin wrote:That's cool shit!


Yeah, I think I hear more definition with the pad on.


I bought an inline mic booster a couple months ago. It's pretty badass; it'll wake the fuck up out of a low output mic. It's cool to use on any dynamic just for a slightly different flavor, too

I'm pretty sure thats just because I bumped the mix when I swapped cables. I probably knocked it a little more towards the speaker edge.