Blue Mics Visits CRAS

CRAS was honored to have two sales members, Ben Thompkins and CRAS Grad Bailey Beechler, from Blue Microphones, to come speak to us at this week’s free AES meeting. They also spent most of the day at CRAS, lending their new gear to our student’s band clinic for the day!

At the AES meeting that evening, Bailey opened with her story of how she attended CRAS, and then explored her opportunities at Blue after a couple internships, and has been working there ever since. Ben was a touring musician, and then went back home to finish college at USC. He has worked for Blue for seven years and is the second longest working employee at the company.

Going on, Ben continued to speak about the history of Blue and how it was started up in Los Angeles in 1995. That means of course Blue is now celebrating their 20th anniversary this year! Before Blue made it big, they got the opportunity to have a display booth at the AES Convention, which was in Los Angeles that year. During that convention they were greeted by a company named Guitar Center, and the rest was history.

Blue Mics continue to attend conventions and seminars regularly, and has attended CES, E3, and Musikmesse this year in addition to coming to CRAS.

After the introduction and history of the company, the talks then turned our focus onto their products. Ben broke down their studio microphones into four sections: essentials, specialties, multi-patterns, and interchangeable capsules.

For their interchangeable capsules, they have nine different microphones, including the Blue Bottle, Bottle Rocket Stage Two, and Bottle Rocket Stage One. Following that, Ben explained consumer products like USB plug-in microphones. Bailey went on to demonstrate their new headphones, including a recently released set called Mo-Fi, which have many attractive features – such as being active headphones and containing a power amplifier.

As a matter of fact, CRAS is also holding a raffle to give away one of these brand new Mo-Fi headphones to one lucky student! The meeting ended with all the students in attendance getting a raffle ticket for a chance to win a set of Blue Mo Fi Headphones, as well as a couple Blue T-Shirts!

It was a pleasure to have Ben and Bailey at CRAS to talk about all things Blue. CRAS AES is very grateful for their time and knowledge and we hope to see them back soon. CRAS is proud to have an ongoing relationship with Blue, and we love having their mics in our mic locker!

Special thanks to Matt P. for the write up, and to Sandi Miller for the pics!