A Brief Guide to Radio Mics : 4 Ways to Wire Yourself

hello this is kim kyland back again this is eric blue with me i think you guys remember him hey guys we're here at cannibal industries in santa clarita and we are going to show you some helpful tips on how to mic yourself today what are some situations where you'd have to mic yourself off the top of my head uh if you are a youtuber an aspiring influencer if you're a vlogger or just on a film set and you're not totally sure of the hygiene protocol and you just want to make yourself you want to feel a little safer and doing it on your own obviously this stuff takes practice you know um but we'll kind of get you on the right road should we get started let's get started let's go where are we going so the first thing we want to start talking about is where you want to place your mic and why placing your mic is about striking a balance between a few different variables generally speaking your love is going to sound its best when it's fully exposed to surrounding air but there are a couple issues that come up with this one obvious problem is that with your mic mounted on the outside of your clothing your audience can see it now while that can be acceptable in some news and broadcast situations it's generally not preferred the second issue is that when your mic is exposed it becomes vulnerable to noise from wind and surrounding airflow so what are some things to consider here well the first thing to consider with a lavalier is what is the what is the polar pattern what's the listening pattern on it so if you hold that up for me this 4063 is what's called an omnidirectional which means it's getting 360 degrees on this axis and then 360 degrees on this one so you can point the mic up you can point it down you can put it on its side so if we have the microphone pointing up and down and we're in an open open-air situation and i'll give you an example with open air so i've got my mic hidden behind my lapel here and if i look down on it and i say the letter p or t or d you know i've got this big plus of air that's coming out of my mouth right so what can be beneficial is maybe not if you have an open air like on your shirt um you could potentially put it uh not even there we could actually go up if it went to your skin where the hem of your shirt is up between your skin there so right here we could actually hide that in a way that the element is just kind of like here's the hem of the shirt here's the microphone itself and you know it's basically flush but what might actually be a little bit better is if you know turning the microphone on the side because that microphone is listening in a 360 degrees so instead of that plosive of air coming down hitting the top of the mic it's just kind of rushing past the grill so that might be one of the reasons why you turn it upside down now when i do neckties i always put the microphone in the tie and i'll come around the neck and everything like that but most of the time what ends up happening is is like when you look at a tie so you have the microphone and it actually is pointing down but that's about the only place you can really put it you know it's pointing down you know that's right it's a little bit throaty there but you know if you try to get that into the the lapel of the jacket or anything you're going to get a bunch of shoulder noise and all that let's talk about what that means what you just said throaty so what are you referring to so let's just demonstrate it so being throaty is going to sound like this hi i'm eric ballou and it probably sounds a whole lot different with the microphone up in my throat it sound different up there todd okay i was looking for affirmations affirmation and all things in my life so what about the opposite of throaty what if you put it down what if i put it near my belly button give me another example just keep i'll keep doing it so as you can tell my voice actually you know sounds like i'm a whole lot closer but um if i just uh kill my microphone and we're just listening to you but you're hearing right now you're hearing the crosstalk or to my mic obviously i'm gonna sound like i'm a lot farther away you know and then i'll bring my own mic back in and so having it far away not necessarily a good thing totally so when placing your mic you have a few different options you might get something like this which is a little mini mount that the lav mic will be placed into you might get something prepared even with a little bit of fur to give it some extra wind protection extra clothing noise wrestle protection or you could get something something like this this is our chest strap so these things are pretty great they're awesome yeah this one would go like so under your clothes preferably but the cool part about this other than the fact that it has several sized pockets here depending on how thick or small your lavalier mic is it's also got this really cool feature on the underside for cable management so the cable just goes right through these cool little slots and doesn't move so that is going to bring us into our next tip which is cable management and we'll start off with talking about why cable management is important so the top that you're wearing underneath the uh the second layer there is kind of thin so if you just let the wire just fall straight to the ground you know we're going to create shadows you know shadows are everywhere our key lies in front of us here and it's going to cast a shadow to anything behind it so what i like to do is we've got the mic here in the center and then i like to go horizontally across underneath the pectoral and i choose the pack because it's in effect creating a shadow because most of the time the light is coming from above anyways so you you're kind of taking advantage of the the shadows created and then i oftentimes just come straight down the side you know and that gives you a little bit of more strain relief as your your torso is turning that's very important strain relief we you know once you've got this beautifully placed mic we don't want the cable to be so tight that when you turn you rip it out of place in this chest strap it's kind of great because it does it for you in a way you can just feed it a little back that way and you can use a piece of our ursa tape to keep that just in place where you want it so tape is always a great option what are some other cable cable tension relief cable management tricks you use some people will do what's called a sailor's knot i i haven't done in a while but i'll show you a sailor's knot okay navy guy over here he's got knots i have another lavalier wire here and i'll show you how to do it all right here we go so you take a wire that's a sailor's knot now you'll notice that i got this nice and loose here okay and what you do is you can run across with a piece of tape across the concealer here yep and then you got this little you know sailor's knight here that's also kind of taking the um turning the cable for you a little bit yep and once you've got that mounted on yourself um your stain relief is so if you tape it here you know your skin stretches you got some you got some play in there i like it and this is also acting as a little bit of a suspension here so but the trick is don't don't pull it tight you're not tying your shoes here you know you're just kind of keeping it just a little bit loose you know nice and then if you'll notice you see how i got the sailor's not done so at face value it looks simple but i actually i tied it in a certain way because what i'm trying to do is the the looping is actually forcing it out it's forcing it back to the towards the skin totally yeah you can use some ursa tape for this which is hypoallergenic and comes off cleanly and easily doesn't leave any residue on clothing or your skin but tension relief on the cable is very [Music] important all right so now we're bringing you transmitters this is a very essential part of your setup that will have to be placed somewhere on your person if you know you're going to be stationary sometimes you can get away with it sitting on the desk next to you i don't ever recommend this because even i have tried to do that and i forget that it's there and i get up and it falls off the table hits the ground it's it's not a it's basically like driving away from the gas pump with the hose still in your car the worst oh my god it's very embarrassing yep so i have a larger transmitter here this is a sennheiser g3 these are amazing i've used these for a lot of dock work the downside to these is they're a little heavier and they're obviously bigger now we have pouches that are sized to this but if you're wearing a super skin tight dress or you have just a little bit of athletic clothing on there are certain outfits where this will genuinely be harder to hide so you might want to budget for a different type of wireless in a situation like that if you know that you're going to need a smaller transmitter and that brings me to what eric has in his hand so for me i'm a production sound mixer and i'm the owner operator of all my own equipment and all of my transmitters are from zaxcom and i have quite a few of the zaxcom zmt-3s they're very very small so depending on a lot of variables uh one of the things i might choose is going to be one of the waste packs you know so if the person's pants i can't like put a belt clip on them um you know if they're wearing a onesie there's a lot of reasons why you use this so on this particular strap you've got the pouch here on the back and the zaxcom zmts they fit down in here really really great and it's got just enough tension in here that holds it very it holds it in there yeah holds in there pretty good now let's let's let's back up just a little bit because we were just talking about cable management that's right most of the lavalier wires that i have in my kit are anywhere from like five to six feet long the reason that is is because you got this wires you know starting at the sternum coming around underneath the peck and then coming down the torso and sometimes i'll put it all the way down at the person's ankle some of you may have done that been given the lav bullet or something like a long stick to get it all the way down to your ankle yep so there's a lot of extra cable there so where you're going to put that so if i got this at the base of my back i've got like three extra feet of cable there's got to go away well what you can do is if you got some of those little finger size rubber bands okay you put that on your finger first and you can loop up that cable and then right next to where the main pouch is you got a secondary little pouch where you can tuck that excess cable that you don't need right of everything now what if somebody just takes a transmitter sticks it in their back pocket and sits down on it so rf does not pass through water it just doesn't and we are made of 70 water so um the more that this thing is buried even around flesh you're going to lose you're going to lose range yep totally so having it somewhere i mean that's why these straps are so great you can place them anywhere they're so versatile you can have it on your outer ankle your inner thigh there's so many options with these so one of my other personal favorites is the ursa backstrap now i did a documentary recently where we were in with a lot of gymnasts in in these gyms and we're watching them do insane moves that were amazing these are olympic level gymnasts once i put that back strap under their leotard that transmitter did not move it was amazing so these velcro like so very easily and then it's not going anywhere yeah i can actually show you how to take velcro apart and you won't hear it okay so all you got to do okay this is cool god damn it actually really scared me i saw somebody on reddit i've been waiting to do that since you started this oh you got me oh god all right so for our last tip we're going to call this one fabric fidgeting and fixes i can dig it so i have my grandmother's necklace on today it's gonna help me make a little point about jewelry i've worked in a lot of documentary situations where a subject during a very quiet interview has some real jangly bracelets a loud moving necklace and sometimes there's just nothing to do about it you have to work around it you can think about things like do your dialogue in between movement but that doesn't come out so well it can be a bit stiff yeah because like you know if i talk to you like this hey let's go over to subway it's over there you know we're not robots exactly so what do you want to try to do with that is keep it from sliding exactly we don't want this noise here let's see can you hear it in my lavalier it's very noisy so i can take a little piece of ursa tape either the sticky tape or the very sticky tape depending on how much coverage i would need just a little bit on the back stick it either directly to the clothing directly to the skin whatever works let's talk about some other things to just keep in mind like picking your outfit for the day what types of fabrics you want to stay away from what types of fabrics are more conducive to a nice silent take um polyester is not a good one scratchy cotton is usually pretty wet cotton's really nice silk is not too bad silk can be good um but some of the more synthetic fabrics in my experience have been a little more problematic that's true but you just adapt and overcome if you cannot move a lot while you're talking that'll help you if you can just go with a different outfit altogether that's awesome if you can't we have some other products that can help you the mini mounts are a great option because they create that space in the clothing right boundary exactly they'll lift one layer away from the other layer now if you need even more protection in that case i will often pair a mini mount with a piece of fur either directly on top of the mount or on the the opposing fabric that would touch the other fabric so if you're at home and you're a vlogger what i highly highly recommend doing is take some time where you're not messing with the camera put your receiver on your desk or on your waist plug your headphones into that and practice wiring yourself using various different methods be it you're adding fur to the outside of it you're using a concealer or just any plethora of things but find what works but what you need to do is is this takes practice i've been recording sound professionally for 21 years and i'm not an expert on anything i know there's there's certain methods and procedures that i i know that work and tried and true but i don't know everything so you know sometimes when no one's around you know i get a little bored hey let me try this little thing out try this little method out you know have other little tricks absolutely i mean it's all about trial and error listening is a super important element of what we do just listen try things fail change your clothes change the wind protection just do a bunch of different stuff and see what works for you specifically these tips are things that have worked for us in the past but eric's been doing this longer than i have he's still learning i'm definitely still learning we hope this has been helpful if you have any comments questions please leave them down below we'll do our best to answer you and give a detailed response thank you so much stay happy stay safe and stay healthy [Music] you

Channel: URSA Straps

Views: 6,034

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Id: 2PWL5IKZQWk

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020