Do I Need An Electret Microphone to Record Music?There are many kinds of electret microphone out there(electret basically means that the microphone has some built in charge and doesn't need a lot of power to work - usually a battery). They are usually cheaper than a professional microphone like a dpa microphone. Electret microphones are commonly used as camcorder mics, and these microphones can be used for plugging directly into computers, DAT recorders, mini disc etc. Also the new breed of flash recorders like the
use the same technology of electret microphones. But for more serious recording you should look to a dynamic or condenser microphone. A typical dynamic microphone is the Shure SM58 
Now a dynamic microphone is great for singing and miking up loud sources like guitar speakers but as you can see from the frequency response below, it doesn't have a flat response and so can't faithfully reproduce all frequencies and therefore all sounds. So you wouldn't use a dynamic microphone to record an orchestra or a violin.
So if you want to record an orchestra or a violin or anything where there is a lot of high frequency information you need a condenser microphone, such as the DPA microphone 4022.
You can see from the graph for the DPA 4022 that the frequency response is very flat up to 20 Khz, so we know that the microphone will reproduce all sounds very well.
Condenser Microphones Obviously there are many types of condenser microphones available from many manufacturers; such as AKG, Neumann, Sennheiser, DPA (at the top end of the market) and Oktava, Blue and Rode (a slightly cheaper option). But they all need power to work, and for condenser microphones it's called phantom power, because the power travels down two of the wires that also carry the audio back to the mixer/amplifier but it's not seen by the audio. Sounds complicated but actually it's just a clever way of getting power to the microphone.
The other main point in choosing a microphone is to decide what kind of polar pattern to use for your microphones. This means in what direction does the microphone pick up sound. Here's an example of a polar pattern. You can see that this kind of microphone only hears in the front and it's called cardiod because it looks a bit like a heart:)
The next polar pattern is called a hypercardiod, because it's slightly tighter than a normal cardiod and picks up even less from the back of the microphone.
The simplest polar pattern for a microphone is an omni, which picks up in all directions equally.
The final type of polar pattern is the figure of eight. It picks up both front and back but is a tighter pattern.
Deciding Which Polar Pattern to Use So what polar pattern should I choose? Well that depends on what and where you are recording. The best sound usually comes from an omni but there aren't many venues where you can get away with using an omni microphone as it picks up everything,the coughs from the audience, the bus outside, the door slamming. So you have to use a microphone that only picks up the sound you want to hear and not all the sound in the room, which usually means a cardiod pattern. So recording microphones come in many varieties and hopefully I have helped clarify when each microphone should be used.
For more information on microphone techinques click here
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