Yesterday I discussed how to choose a mic. Today we’ll talk about using one.
Getting a good sound with a mic is about simplicity. You want the cleanest sound you can, so you have maximum flexibility to manipulate it later on. As is often the way, good mic technique seems simple in principle, but turns out to be complicated and arcane – like cunnilingus.
The most important thing to remember when using a mic is to monitor what they mic’s picking up, not what you’re hearing in the room. As you don’t want the mic to record the sound you’re monitoring, which would create feedback, you need to wear headphones.
The best monitoring headphones are circumaural, and rest on your head, not your ears. If you use regular headphones you’ll hear their sound mixed with what’s happening in the room and it’ll throw your judgement off. For this reason I prefer to use in-ear monitors (think earplugs with speakers inside them) which provide great sound, and work like earplugs to block out all the sound in the room.
Now you can hear yourself, here’s what to listening for and how to fix it.
Pops
Pops happen when your mic is temporarily overloaded and the audio signal becomes a straight line. They’re most often caused by percussive constants like ‘p’ and ‘t’ which you can only say by spitting out a lot of air, often too much for a mic to handle.
The simplest way to reduce popping is to back off the mic. Usually that’s not an option because you need to stay close for good sound. In that case the next simplest solution is to change the way you ‘address’ the mike.
Most microphones pick up as much sound side on as the do straight on (it’s what allows mobile phones to work inches from your mouth and off to one side). If you move our mic so you’re speaking across it, rather than into it, you’ll pick up just as much sound but find it a lot harder to create a pop.
The last option is a pop-shield. A pop-shield is just a thin piece of material stretched over a frame and placed between your mouth and the mic. If you hit a percussive consanant the air you ejaculate gets diffused by the material, allowing the mic to record the sound without overloading.
It’s important to note that a pop-shield isn’t a wind-shield (which is normally a foam blob on the end of a mic). A wind shield does nothing to stop pops and is only really useful if you’re recording where there’s a wind. Obviously. Indoors a wind-shield’s not needed.
Distance
The distance your mouth is from a mic is important. The closer you get the more bass is recorded (this is known as the ‘proximity effect’, the further away the more of the room sound is recorded.
Being too close sounds muddy and a little gross, there are lots of wet mouth sounds you make when you talk that only a microphone can hear (listen to Podnography #2 for lots of gross mouth sounds). Being too far away makes you sound as if you’re in a tunnel and pollutes your signal with too much noise.
Finding the right distance is a matter of trial and error which depends on how loud you are, when you find it, it can be easily remembered by setting a pop-shield up at that distance and using it as a guide.
Breathing
If you’re using a head-worn mic it can be hard to set it up to capture your voice but not your breathing. If you’re a mouth breather try using your nose – other people do it all the time and it’ll sound, and look, better.
If your mic’s on a stand, the key is to only address the mic when you have something to say and keep your mouth away from it at all other times. That allows you to set the mic for maximum sensitivity without inadvertently recording the sounds of your digestion.
So that’s it for mics. In the next installment we’ll take a look at recording software, how to choose it, use it and what to look out for.
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Hey Sug, I hope some podcasters read your suggestions. A couple of notes –
while moving a mic slightly to the left or right from dead on center is a great way to reduce or eliminate plosives, you’ve got to watch rotating the mic off-axis. a mic is ‘on-axis’ when the diaphragm is pointed directly at the sound source (in this case the podcasters mouth.) as you rotate a mic ‘off-axis’ (pointing not directly at the speakers mouth) the frequency response changes often resulting in a more muffled sound.
proximity effect is a product of cardiod mics (and figure 8 mics) but not omnidirectional mics so make sure you know which type of pick up pattern your mic is, and the distance when it becomes ‘too much’ is a couple of inches or less.
Lemon,
Great additions as before. Everything you say is right and – oh how you’ll laugh at the next podcast which was done with an awful mic, no real gain control while tracking and missing software.
At least I know why it sounds a bit dodgy though.
I think Omni’s would be hard to use in most living-rooms but obviously, somone with a bit more knowledge could hack together a better acoustic (using relatives and pets as sound absorbers or something). I think your average podcaster still thinks $100 is a lot for a microphone when they sell them for $9.99 at Tandy. I am picking up a Blue Snowball this weekend – I suspect it might become ‘the’ podcaster’s mic.