Sound is moving air. I microphone picks up the movement either through wiggliness or compression and turns it into electricity.
Microphone aiming
- Unidirectional mics can hear in one direction like a telescope. You point them at the hole in your mouth and they will not pickup a ton of other noise.
- Omnidirectional mics listen in all directions. You put them close to your mouth and they will pick up everything that’s going on around them, but if your mouth is close, they will pickup your voice louder than everything else.
- Shotgun mics have two microphones. They listen like a telescope, but then they also have another microphone that listens to the ambient noise and tries to cancel it out. They are good if you want to get space between your mouth and the mic. Like if you are shooting video and you want the microphone to be off camera.
Microphone Styles
- Headset is worn either on your ear or attached to your head. It is away from your face and close to your mouth. Usually these are unidirectional and right there where they need to be. Used for stage presentations, telemarketers. It’s good for cutting out background noise and wind, with mobility, hands-free
- Lavalier is worn on a clip on a shirt ( stage presentations ), on the hairline (broadway shows), or concealed under clothing (tv & film). They’re omnidirectional, so need to be close and in a relatively quiet environment.
- Hand-held / mounted these are the typical mics from the pictures you see. They can be omni or uni or shotgun.
The goal is flawless audio from the start
An audience can shut their eyes, or look away from visuals, but they can’t shut their ears. We gotta make audio superb in everything. The only thing we can really do in the alteration of audio feeds / recordings is to remove data from the audio. We can’t photoshop it. As audio compresses for transfer through wires and even internet, it loses quality and clarity.
If you record with noisy background, echo, extra mouth noises, and you remove them in post, you’ll also be removing some of the good stuff that you want to share. No way around it.
Noise is everywhere
The A/C, your neighbors, helicopters, instruments, audio playback, your fridge can all make background noise. Ways to reduce it include unplugging and turning off anything noisy, wear headphones to hear audio you need to hear, plan things around quiet times, close windows, do things in places with heavy walls.
You want your face to be super close to the input device too, but if you breathe on the mic, you can make the microphone pop when you use plosives. Wind shields and pop guards can prevent your breath from making noise. Also, depending on how your mouth makes words, you might be able to change the position of a mic so it and your breath are in a long-distance relationship.
Echo sounds like it could be cool, but if you don’t have control over it, it sucks. It can also make a small room sound small and amateurish. Sound bounces like a billiard ball off hard surfaces at right angles. If the room you’re in is a cube made of marble, you’ll have a lot of echo. You wanna get weird angles and softness around you. I’ve recorded things in bed under a big blanket. It’s hot, but not echo-y!
Hard room fixes: don’t talk straight towards a wall talk at an angle. Put something soft behind the microphone so you’re talking either into the microphone or into that soft pile of towels. Talk quieter with the microphone closer. Put more things in the room that are soft or angled. If a sound bounces one time before coming back to the mic it’s stronger than if it bounces twice.
Microphone quality
Microphone quality matters more than you may be able to detect. Our brains add closure to sounds we hear. We cognitively fill the gap. If a brain is working too hard to imagine what’s not there, it might not pickup the message or the beauty of the sound that is there. If someone’s listening to your voice with background music or at double speed on a podcast, clarity will be super crucial to their enjoyment.
Good quality microphones…
- are sensitive and can pickup sounds easily
- have big dynamic range. That means they can hear low pitched and high pitched sounds.
- have balance in that range so that they don’t pickup one frequency more than another