Flea 47

The Flea 47 (a.k.a. FLEA 47) is a valve condenser microphone, which an exact replica of the Neumann U47.

Peter Gabriel and engineer Richard 'Dickie' Chappell adopted the Flea 47 as the main vocal microphone during the recording of the orchestral album New Blood in 2010. They had a original reconditioned Telefunken U47 around for a long time, but the Flea offered a certain freshness which worked really well with Peter's voice. It was matched with a Millenia mic preamp, which Chappell felt perfectly complemented the Flea 47 and added a clean and noise-reduced sound.

Quotes on the Flea 47
"'About three years ago FLEA contacted us via the website to say that they would really like Peter (Gabriel) to try out some microphones. We were happy to do this, but at that time we were in the middle of other things – overdubbing, finding new ideas, grabbing what was available at the time – so it did not feel it was the right time then, but we were still very interested in pursuing the idea. [...] We tried a few different microphones in 2009 when we were recording the vocals for [Scratch My Back] and were not wholly happy with what was going on. I remembered FLEA and the contact so I contacted Ivan last spring and said 'what have you got?' We talked about what was available – we record in a very live room; Peter likes to hear himself a lot when he sings [...] So I asked about what microphones they had with a lot of back rejection 'cause I can get a lot of bleed in the room while Peter is trying things out and it would be good to be able to capture it without a lot of spill. So they sent over the FLEA 47 and the FLEA 49 and we went straight to the 47. [...] So the 47 went up, we switched it on and Peter started singing, and that was it really. Peter just went 'yeah, that's great'. We have a history of working with 47s, we have had a Telefunken, reconditioned now.'"

Further information

 * Sound On Sound