what mic or mics does dr luke use?
someone?
also does he have some kind of eq to remove the mud when recording vocals
In his home studio at malibu I believe the mic he uses is a white Blue Woodpecker mic, probably custom made.
http://bluemic.com/woodpecker/#/desc/
I'm not sure if he goes into conway studios as much as he used to, I think he works mostly at home now. But he used to work in studio C over there. Here's the list of the equipment:
http://www.conwayrecording.com/download/studioc.pdf
And for EQs and all that, it's mostly Waves or Pro Tools stock effects. I can tell you that Serban Ghenea uses exclusively software to mix his songs, so a lot of Luke's songs are mixed with software.
But really what matters in vocal recording is that you record in a good environment, or at least try to create a good one to record in. A good recording goes a long way and there's not much EQ to be done really, just cutting the lows and moderately boosting/cutting a few frequencies. Any good EQ could do the job. Rule of thumb: If you catch yourself trying to polish a turd, the turd will still remain a turd.
The money you don't spend on cracked plugins, spend it on material to create a nice recording booth :)
I know for a fact that Luke and max used the Manley Reference Cardioid mic on a lot of songs (first Katy album). Luke used that on all the Avril tracks as well!
Max even used the manley for the old britney songs (there's a clip somewhere on youtube where you can see it), they also used a neve 1073 preamp with a built in eq when recording!