Deciding on what microphone to use can be a difficult task. If your studio is large enough to hire a helper, it's not a problem to check microphone after microphone while you sit in the control room and listen back. But let's get back to reality! You don't have a big studio, and chances are it's just you working there. While you could set up a microphone, do a short recording, and repeat this several times with other microphones, that's inefficient and makes it hard for you to compare each microphone to each other. But how can you get around it?

If you have a few microphone inputs available, set up as many microphones as you feel like (or have available) in front of your sound source. Let's use a guitar amplifier as an example. Set up four microphones on the speaker, each at varying distances and locations around the speaker and record them all at the same time. When you play back the tracks, listen to them one at a time (use the solo feature) and see what you like best. If you find a microphone that stands out as the winner, delete the other tracks and you're done. Or you might also find that blending several microphones at once gives you the sound you're looking for. In any case, keep track of which microphone goes to which input!