How to Choose the Right Microphone for your Voice

[Music] [Music] all right hello everyone good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are in the world my name is Jason Levine and thank you so much for joining me today on Adobe live for an audio masterclass around how to choose the best or really the right microphone for your voice or for your particular recording situation it's interesting actually over the last couple of weeks you know obviously since everyone's kind of working remotely and trying to figure out new solutions to do things and how to communicate a lot of questions about using the right microphone are they choosing the right microphone are they positioning the microphone correctly why does it sound thin why does it sound to boo me why is it to bassy why doesn't it sound why is there no sound so today I thought I would cover a whole bunch of things and we're gonna be showcasing all different types of mics some really cool vintage ones like this one that I have here this is an AKG d12 ii from 1968 also known as the Ringo kick drum mic this is one of my all-time favorites I've had this for a super long time we're gonna cover the differences between the different types of microphones that you will encounter like dynamic and condenser talk a bit about pickup patterns and then actually audition the sound of each of these to kind of give you an idea of sort of what they sound like and how and what you can kind of expect when recording with these devices so as always we're coming to you live on Behance Adobe live and YouTube as well as Facebook so be sure to join the chat over on be hands net slash Adobe live that's where the conversation is happening that is the chat that I'll be following so you definitely want to go over there to ask your questions and start engaging all right very very cool yes oh yeah Eric you've already you've already beaten me to it my favorite Harry Potter line we will revisit that later what's up Keith Aguilar Cody Baird loving vintage mics Steve how's it going dee Flynn nice to see you Tunch nice to see you Andreas hello Jennifer Thompson Chris all right and Wade and Colin always such a nice big international audience and coming to us over on Twitter periscope we've got Gary and Desiree and schoo Summa as well among many others okay pho my life great to see you with well awesome okay so let's go ahead and I'm gonna switch over to my screen but before I actually get into recording mics and getting into all of that there are some things that need to be shared because this is a master class so we're gonna have a little sort of education here around microphone basics and again I've been seeing a lot of stuff over the last couple of weeks some of which quite frankly is a bit frightening because there's just a lot of misinformation out there you won't get that here you're going to get information here so let's talk about microphone types first and foremost okay now there are essentially four four major microphone types they are dynamic condenser ribbon and pzm the latter two you will unlikely ever have to encounter unless you're a recording engineer like me and using them in a studio these are not readily available they're not for typical voiceover or podcast these are really specific to you know instrument recording live type recording and halls and things like that you're never really gonna need to encounter those and I wouldn't recommend attempting to use one of those for podcast or live streaming either because there's certain considerations when using ribbon and pzm the two main one that we're going to focus on are dynamic microphones and condenser microphones so a couple of classic dynamic microphones that many of you will be familiar with the shore sm58 which I actually have off off camera right here we're gonna be testing this one out a little bit this is probably one of the most common and most recognizable dynamic microphones out there it's used on stage it's used in the studio it is virtually indestructible it has been around forever it's got this built-in windscreen and we'll talk a bit about that and it's just a rugged solid kind of works on everything from voice to guitar to kick drum to you know ambient outdoor recordings it's a staple it's very inexpensive and it's accessible to everyone now another really common like that you see and in fact I believe we've got some of these in the Adobe live studios in San Francisco a couple of my colleagues use these I know a lot of broadcasters use this this is the shore s m7b now this is yet another dynamic microphone it's worth pointing out by the way that these dynamic microphones including this electro voice re 20 this is another really common one that you see especially in student radio and broadcast studios it's been around forever it just has that kind of radio sound but there's two key fundamental things about dynamic microphones first of all well 3 they don't require any additional power and we'll get to that when we talk about condensers condensers use something called phantom power you might see on your sound devices or something that's a little annotation that says plus 48v a lot of times you can also use batteries to power condenser microphones dynamic mics don't require any such thing you basically plug them in set the gain and you can start going now the other thing to keep in mind with dynamic mics is that these are also known as top address microphones or front address meaning that you sing in to the top that's where the capsule is at the top similarly down here you would put your mouth where I'm circling right here or right here these are not meant to be spoken to perpendicularly from the side and this is a really common problem that I see with people using things like blue yetis we'll get to that in a minute so dynamic microphones typically our top address front address microphones the other thing is that dynamic microphones by nature also allow you to take advantage of something known as proximity effect now the microphone that I use for my regular streams here in here I can just kind of cut to this real quickly where did I put that oh it's right here here I've got this other camera so this is my we're gonna talk about this one in a minute this is an audio technica 84 T 50 multi pattern condenser I don't need to be very close to this microphone at all in fact you want to be a bit further away by nature condenser mics will pick up a slightly larger frequency response and you don't want to get too close because any sort of low frequency in your voice can really get over accentuated and you'll incur not only plosives but sometimes distortion dynamic microphones want you to be right on top of them and the term and radio is kind of like eating the mic you want this thing well you'll see singers like in videos right in these mics are screaming because that's where you want to be by doing that it's going to still deliver a very clean sound but it's also going to amplify and accentuate low frequency in a very warm nice sounding way that's called proximity effect that's why these latter two microphones in particular are so popular in radio because even if you've got a thinner smaller voice if you bring one of these in and you speak on them correctly which is known as being on axis and again really right up front you're going to get a very rich warm full-bodied kind of sound okay makes sense looking to see if we've got some cues already we're gonna go over the Yeti in just a second Jennifer awesome awesome Alicia this is so good very nice oh yes the yeah Steve's trying to scroll okay all right so let's go to a couple condenser microphones so again I just listed now this happens to be an AKG this is either a 40 60 yard or a 20 20 I can't remember I've got the 40 60 that's a tube-based version of this mic here there's also the very popular AKG c4 14 B this is I'm actually that should be 80 not AKG that's a typo the c4 14 we see this a lot with late-night talk show host Jay Leno you see use one of these I think Jimmy Fallon might still use one they also have these with a silver capsule by the way these are known as side address microphones and you can tell that because see this huge thing these are what are also known as large diaphragm condenser you see this big circle right here yeah that's where your voice needs to go alright if you're singing from the top like this you're doing it wrong you are off axis you're not getting the benefits of using that microphone correctly and your sound is going to be a bit wack so these are side address microphones now all three that I have here are also what are known as multi pattern and here I'm going to show you on this other 40-50 that I have here I think I can I can probably do this a bit more elegantly here you're getting a full full little tutorial right now alright so with a lot of your condensers it's not quite focusing as much as I'd like that's all right so first of all you'll see that it has this low-cut filter alright so this is great when if you know let's say you already have sort of a naturally bass voice and you want to roll off frequency this is I think around 80 Hertz you can enable this low frequency cutoff and it's just going to eliminate all of that low end kind of thumpy rumbling as' and it's wonderful now what this also has is a pad on here so again for super hot signals you can implement this 10 DB pad which automatically attenuates the pickup of that large diaphragm condenser capsule so it's it's less sensitive to higher sound pressure level alright and then the other thing that you have here is this multi pattern selector and by default we're gonna cover pickup patterns in just a second this microphone does cardioid which we'll talk about that's the most standard and certainly for all of your dynamic microphones Omni and figure eight and you can probably guess what figure eight is and when it's figure eight that actually allows you to sing on either side of the microphone when you enable that function so if you've ever seen like classic studio pictures of you know the Beatles in the studio John and Paul and they're singing face to face like that they're using a figure eight pattern on what is most typically in those days anointment microphone like the one that you see on screen here okay that's a figure eight pattern a lot of your condensers will have that if they're multi pattern condensers okay now condensers also have more sensitivity so again a lot of your some people mentioning yetis and things like that you know if you've ever wondered why it tends to pick up everything and the yetis in particular I'm not a huge blue Mike's fan in general it's nothing against blue it's just I don't care for them myself sonically and they don't work for my voice they pick up everything and they're very very sensitive so again the dynamic mics while they may have a similar frequency response that's the frequency that they capture at the lowest end and all to the highest-end they're a little more forgiving they're gonna capture a little less background ambience condenser microphones if you're not in a really quiet space they're gonna pick up everything but that's the nature they're gonna pick up the clarity and then the end the sparkle that exists which is why you will see these use for vocals you'll see these used for acoustic guitars and there's many varieties of condensers there's also by the way front top address condensers as well you also these are often like the cigar style mics this is what I used recently for our master class livestream when I was at the piano those were top address condensers pointing straight down on the piano okay a little bit on those condenser microphones and then we get to our USB and mini plug microphones which can be a combination of dynamic and condenser all right so you can see here this familiar rode one I actually have an older version of that too I can cut back to this cam for a second here so this is a battery-powered condenser mic with a hot shoe this goes right into the camera records in dual channel mono which you know they say records in stereo but you know it's really dual channel mono that's a condenser variety that Samsung Samson oh you--oh one you again this is a bit old now I think they're on the O 2 now also is a front address sorry this is a side address condenser and then here's your blue Yeti now again the way that this is positioned right here that's the way you should be speaking into the Yeti with that volume and the logo facing you when you see people who've got the Yeti tilted like this and there's they're speaking into the top it's not a it's not a top address mic you're doing it wrong so when you hear a lot of like why does it sound maybe you're getting an echo reflection from your desk because the sound is bouncing off of that and into the capsule or it sounds further away or it just sounds different because you're not speaking into the capsule directly so it's always a good idea to understand where the pickup of the microphone is supposed to be I can't tell you how many times I've seen not just yetis but other things that are just improperly placed shall Levy's these condensers where their like top address but totally missing the boat there alright alright and shotgun yes we're gonna get to that too so now I'm going to cover that in a moment we're gonna cover that when we get to pick up patterns but I will show you so right up here this is a staple in the shotgun world this is the Sennheiser MKH 416 probably the most common the most famous shotgun variety this one is also a condenser mic so again it requires phantom power it has incredible incredible sonic clarity it also has incredible noise rejection and that's based on the pickup pattern which we're going to cover here in just a second and this can be used this is used in studios for dialogue replacement you know on scene on you know on set live dialogue capture it's an extremely powerful microphone and again if you're going to be using stuff outdoors and things this is the kind of this is the kind of setup that you want alright I talked about a couple of other mics here you know the apogee 96k mic this one I turned Terry white on two years ago absolutely works for his voice loves it this is another great one and it's USB it is phantom power as well okay but it's bus powered phantom power so it doesn't actually let me rephrase that it's bus powered it doesn't require phantom power sorry okay so let's get into some of the pickup patterns here alright so we were just talking about these moments ago when you have an asari that it's a little blurry on screen here when you have multi pattern microphones so the first here is omnidirectional and as the circular pattern illustrates that is a microphone that picks up from all positions so think of that that doesn't mean 360 because ambi sonic is a completely different thing but this is the kind of microphone that if I put this mic right here into Omni it just picks up from all sides right so let's say that we wanted to record something like a conference room session you would use Omni because then it just picks up from it picks up the entire room now with that said it picks up the entire room so you're going to hear all the noise all the ambience all the glottal sounds from everybody's mouth depending upon the sensitivity of the microphone you don't typically you don't typically you know use Omni unless you're trying to capture you know global room ambience if you're doing an interview you're not gonna use omnidirectional okay so again there's reasons to use it room tone ambience capture but if you're trying to do like direct interviews you do not want to be on an omni pattern and the next one here is cardioid okay now this as you can see illustrated this being where the front of the capsule is it picks up mostly from the front and you can see it has some very nice rear rejection here not total rear rejection meaning it's not it'll still pick up some sound from behind it but largely it's filtered out based on this cardioid pattern this is what most of your commercial microphones podcast microphones almost every microphone that doesn't have that is not Omni okay is going to be cardioid if it only has one pickup pattern it's going to be cardioid right most common clean sound real nice alright bi-directional just kind of skipping ahead here you can see that's the figure eight so you can see it picks up from the front or wherever the you know this both sides of the capsule right so you can have two heads side-by-side or face to face rather singing harmonizing that pattern is wonderful see that a lot with background vocals I love capturing vocals like that whenever I capture handclaps if I can get a group of people I do it with figure eight and it gives you kind of this just nice very just saw modernized kind of sound and then you have the last two which is hyper-cardioid and super cardioid and the mkh 416 is what we call a super cardioid pickup pattern so it only picks up audio from the front at a very narrow in a very narrow space and it has almost complete and total rear rejection here okay so that's why this is so good for being on set you know even if you're in like a windy outdoor environment these things are laser-focused but that also means you positioning of them needs to be laser-focused when you see the boom operators you know and they're holding those mics that capsule that front end of the capsule there and that's another good example this is a top address condenser right you've got a position that right where the mouth is and think of it this way think of it when you're setting your aperture on your camera right you can have things wide open or super super tight and closed right you've got to have this really really close really really small to really focus in on where that mouth is because if you move ten degrees to the left or right you're off axis and you're not gonna pick up the best sound okay but when you're dialed right in it's amazing how good the sound is and how just full-bodied it is okay so these are the kind of things that you need to be aware of when you're picking up your microphone okay minty what's up damn cardioid kind of thick though very nice oh and labs as well did I pull where did I put that lav mic oh I had it on the table somewhere here I don't know what I did with it Oh ant love it thanks ma'am yes and most of your lavalier mics these are typically also condensers right clip-ons that you'll do here I don't I don't I put it on the floor oh it's on the floor hold on this is live why can't I just get up okay so here is by the way you know can you tell I used to own studios and I'm a bit of a mic closet nerd so again let's switch over to the Brio cam here so typical a typical setup for a lav mic alright here it is okay sorry it's a little blurry there condenser it's got a little pack in the case right here this is where it's battery-powered that powers the that power is the need for phantom power and you've got a couple of clips on here and this just again gives you a nice clean full frequency full-spectrum kind of sound okay and those are you know they're wonderful now again they're also sensitive to shirt movement and other things like that so depending upon the situation you're in where you're recording how you're doing it a lot of times I will instead use something like a shotgun with a boom because then I don't have to worry about rustling and movement and you know just it also just depends who's talking I'm pretty animated so and my hair is getting you know you don't want to use a lav with me you're just gonna get constantly whereas if you're feeding a boom it's just gonna be direct sound and really lovely alright fresh cake got to get a floor cam to cut away oh we've got the floor cam well I mean technically right that's this one Cam's on cams on cams all right okay let's see what else we got here all right all right Yanni Eric yep just talked about that okay Sparkle nice Keith okay all right I had a lot of trading videos at my last job and we called some of them eating the mic must have been condensers no no so again if they really wanted you to eat the mic you don't want to eat a condenser because you're probably gonna incur in over accentuation of base versus you do want to eat the mic with dynamic microphones like this short we're going to get to in just a few seconds here all right okay who has ever been bitten by a vampire clip why do all these master class teachers use max minty no we don't all that's just my main production machine I switch between Mac and PC largely i I do this because it just integrates with all the other stuff in my home so that's the reason use PC if you want it's a choice I like to use both every now and again all right meanwhile the only webcam I've got jitters okay okay so let's go and go into some recording oh and then yes and then the last thing that I'll show you here let's see sparkles yes is this is a now I didn't have any I never use USB microphones it's also worth pointing out by the way that all of these mics here are analog so they're connected via an analog XLR cable alright you can see that also known as your Canon plug and that is fed into my sound device here where you have the analog to digital conversion happening now a lot of people ask because a lot of the newer microphones out there you have mics that simulate like this Audio Technica that I'm using they're far less expensive they're condenser but they're USB and a lot of people say well and maybe they even have an XLR version of the USB microphone like well which one is better here's the thing when they're USB they have circuitry built into them which means that the analog to digital conversion is happening on device to be honest it's not always the best even with good USB microphones now some better than others I would say the apogee series apogee still probably does but back in the 90s they were no they were a an A to D conversion that's what they built they built little black boxes that did analog digital conversions for doing tape to digital transfers and my earliest days as a mastering engineer we had a whole series of apogee a to D converters and then DJ for the play out of the systems not all are created equal so when you're going into something like my sound device here which is a focus right Clarett the analog digital converters are amazing I mean that that's what you're paying for with a blue Yeti or even the at2020 USB it's just not as good all right now most people can be able to tell no well audio nerds maybe again a lot of it has to do with how are you positioned when you're recording right how are you recording it is your game proper you put doing proper gain staging all of these things matter but that's just something to be aware of and when people say like oh is it the same they're not the same okay going analog versus USB it's just not the same because the analog to digital conversion for USB is happening on the device whereas when you're going through your sound device that's something that's designed it has a preamp and that preamp circuitry feeds an analog to digital converter where they probably spend a little bit more money to make that a little bit more transparent and a little bit cleaner okay not that they can't be good just something to be aware of okay and yes Chris is saying not same could be said about audio interfaces not all equal in quality absolutely the truth is you know in 2020 they're all pretty good I mean all of them now do if got some rogue hairs here all of them now do you know 20 24 bit most of them now go to 192 kilohertz sample rate so they all have similar specs but yes they are not all created equal all right exactly Henrik is saying the same with cameras yep absolutely true and tones which sound card so yeah so I'm using a Claire at 8 which is a an 18 or 20 input ract device feeding audition and then coming out of this system it's feeding into the streaming system another Focusrite device all right hahaha Steve I love that yes pay a hundred an hour - neither Jason how to buy a microphone all right nice on your phone love it ok all right so let's get into some recording this is my one USB headset my Gaussian that I have here all right so a couple of additional things before we get rolling so first of all when you're in audition here we're gonna go into audio hardware now we're gonna start by using some of these analog connected microphones first so you can see that under our audio hardware under default input I see a bunch of devices so here's my Thunderbolt device okay now I've got this Brio camera on the machine that also has a microphone that could use that this is the Plantronics USB we'll use that in a couple minutes and then this is a Pro Tools aggregate device which it automatically installs when you install Pro Tools which will take it'll aggregate multiple USB and/or mini plug devices into one a lot of people ask me can you use multiple USB devices in audition well as you see let's say that I had a second USB microphone plugged in here you can only choose one for the input so the way that you have to do that is by creating an aggregate device and you can do that via the what is it the audio MIDI setup now again this is a little different on Windows obviously but this is where you do that on the Mac I get asked this question all the time right so people were like how do i how do i record my Plantronics USB I'm doing the podcast and then I have someone else on a blue Yeti so you would come down here and you would create the aggregate device all right and then from there then you can assign different inputs to that aggregate device and then that's what you choose inside of audition if you want to record that way I don't really recommend that all the time there's also again now it's going through this other thing inside the OS mm quality changes there's you know just be aware all right things can happen ok and then default out but we're gonna go out through the focus right here okay and then you'll see here we've got our channel mapping so depending upon if you're recording in the multi track or the the single track view here typically for the single track view I will assign I usually do that via input six which is this Audio Technica 4050 right here this kind of shows you all of the inputs on this device alright and then it's showing you all the various outputs okay so let's start with the 80 40 50 now again this is a multi pattern condenser microphone you'll also notice that I'm recording into a mono track here all right now by default audition will shut will give you a whole bunch of stereo tracks now you can record a mono signal into a stereo track it's still only going to record one mono WAV file based on how you set the input device right so I have this set to record mono input number six now if I were to do stereo input 5 so this is 5 6 well 5 is on the left six is on the right this happens to a lot of people like ah how come why did that happen well you chose a stereo input for a mono device right now a lot of people ask well how come some microphones they record in stereo remember like this Road you look up roads like the camera the shotgun and video mics and it'll say stereo recording and it does in fact have a stereotypical eave end yes but that now some of them are actual stereo this one here this is old-school this video mic it's dual channel mono it's just mirroring what's in both channels so that's fine you can have a stereo file to channel that is the same content in both sides but if you're starting fresh single input single device single input mono track alright just a good habit to get into the only reason you don't want to necessarily do a stereo a mono recording in a stereo track or vice versa is that when you start applying effects to those things weird stuff starts to happen and that's because it doesn't know how to how to feed the signal it's looking for two channels of input it only has one so you you will likely with some effects get an imbalance and it can be a real drag and Prewitt and yes what's up missed a good info on the USB mics okay sweet love it okay hey source of what's happening all you know how to do is plug in and pray yes and that's the beauty of the USB variety right you just plug in and go you don't really have to do very much typically they might have an input level setting on the front or something like that when you're using analog you have to manually set the inputs and then you're dealing with mixers and all that other stuff okay so excuse me isn't getting kind of hoarse so alright we are armed for recording okay and why don't I go ahead and just you know say a little something here and then we will take a listen back okay here we go hi this is Jason Levine and you are listening to the audio technica 84 t-50 multi pattern condenser now this particular mic that I'm speaking on is actually the exact same mic that I've sung every track I've recorded for the last 25 years since having my first studio in Nashville down off of Music Row it's one of my all-time favorites and it just speaks to perfectly the sound of my voice okay so I've now recorded this track now one of the things that you'll notice is that it's very even right now part of that almost entirely is because I speak for a living so I know how to control my dynamics also I don't use pop filters generally now that's not to say that I never incur popping peas plosives that's that big little burst of air but you'll get but I know how to slightly lift off axis to prevent some of those things I wasn't really doing it here necessarily but a lot of people would say how come you're not using a pop filter well sometimes I do sometimes I don't when singing when I know it's gonna be a bit louder and a bit more intense I will in fact generally use a pop filter because you know it's coming from the diaphragm it's still coming from the diaphragm when I'm talking but it's a little bit different a little bit more controlled in here right but that's one of the things is that this microphone produces a really wide perfect beautiful spectrum let's go ahead and listen back to this hi this is Jason Levine and you are listening to the audio technica 84 t-50 multi pattern condenser alright let's go into the Edit view here I'm just gonna make this a little bit louder because again this is completely untreated so I can just adjust the amplitude right on screen here with this little heads-up display we can play it back from here hi this is Jason Levine and you are listening to the audio technica 84 T 50 multi pattern condenser now this particular mic that I'm speaking on is actually the exact same mic that I've sung every track I've recorded alright now I want to point something out remember I talked about the bass roll-off okay now first of all you notice I said something about particular alright if I could record a little greeting demo and Spanish Dutch and French that would be great I could do that actually no more Dutch and French than I do Spanish which is oddness I live in Arizona I know very little those some I'm bad I used to I leave to learn more should I should have studied Spanish I study French which was great but it's just not used as in as many places okay uh what was I saying I'm not sure Oh bass roll-off so again I have the 80 Hertz roll-off implemented on here so it's automatically when I'm speaking into this condenser it's automatically rolling that off it's not even capturing any of that so for one thing plosives tend to be below 100 Hertz so it's gonna minimize any instancing of that you can visually identify that if your look here on our frequency analysis graph okay approximately this is 80 Hertz right about here and you can see that there's this dramatic slope right just eliminating all of that low-end not the good low-end right it's still warm I've recorded for the last 25 years since having my first studio in Nashville okay it's still warm it's got perfect just mmm brightness and clarity and sparkle but it doesn't have any over accentuated bass now if I wanted this a little bass here a little again again I've got the fans going on the streaming system here I would probably take that bass roll-off off I would lift it right and then it's capturing everything all the way down to 20 Hertz most of these microphones will have very similar it's what's called the frequency response the lowest frequency it can capture up to the highest frequency it can capture this one I believe is most condensers are what they call 20 to 20 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz or 20 kilohertz it's wonderful having that implemented so again when you're sure searching for a microphone if you encounter a lot of plosives a lot of low-end issues in your room in your environment might not be a bad idea of to look for a mic that has a base roll-off okay very cool all right so that is the 80 40 50 multi pattern condenser all right let's go back into our multitrack here just check quickly if I have a the understanding of romantic gliders I should catch it quickly yes stuff does I'm able to you know I'm able to translate it's just I can't speak as many heard many good things about audio technica sources yes it is my absolute favorite brand and misleads me thank you very much for that right into a comment that Yann Erik said at the beginning which is when choosing a microphone it's not just about choosing the one that's the most aesthetically pleasing in your studio although that matters too but for all my Harry Potter fans out there who's a Harry Potter fan let me know in the right now say I love Harry Potter much like was said to Harry in the first film first book the wand chooses the wizard the microphone kinda chooses the voice alright not all mics sound good on every voice and even the same mic can sound different on the same voice okay some voices are better suited for condenser microphones just by the nature of their sound some voices are truly better suited for dynamic microphones all right if you've ever heard voices that again by nature it may be a little bit brighter maybe there's a bit of a mid-range edginess to them a dynamic microphone like in sm7b might be a really good idea alright versus something like a large diaphragm condenser which is really going to accentuate that mid-range crunchiness that high-end brightness okay so it's really a good idea to audition a couple and try and listen for you know what did these actually sound like on my voice and I just gave you kind of a basic guideline it doesn't necessarily always apply as I said now when I did the the piano stream a few weeks ago I sang on this very sm58 right here this one because again for like live voice it's great alright I'm gonna talk about pop filters in a second when I get to this one again this one has it built in on the capsule which you can screw off by the way okay I did it I shall now hug my wand Jennifer not nice hufflepuff Cody I knew that Krista hufflepuff nice dip on car excellent sorsa knew it alright that's so great I am a Gryffindor alright okay hold on we had a couple questions here Jana Eric's asking I often have to mute the low-end 20 Hertz slider on my system equalizer when viewing some streams as their mics pick up the super low Rumble from their AC or PC in their room what's going on there well yeah now again it's you're not I would probably say you probably want to roll off 40 in below because 20 is is not necessarily audible but can be felt for sure and yeah it's just depending upon how they're positioned you know this mic is is on a an old-school this is a 60s desktop mic stand all right this was given to me by by a teacher of mine in high school who says I throw things I don't throw things away I really do but yeah this was actually given to me I mean it's like old old school it even smells old doesn't really smell but I mean it it has that kind of that old-school vibe to it sorry I'm making a bunch of noise as I pick it up so depending about how it's mounted you know this other mic again it's on a boom arm here it has a special shock mount clip that's the other thing how you have the microphone clipped to the stand if you're using the standard microphone clip there's no shock absorption there versus if you're going to something like this now this one this might here actually has this is shock absorbing right you're seeing me move it there now it's still gonna pick up some of that Rumble from the table that's partly also why I have that that 80 Hertz roll-off but this one too this is uh this is a shock absorber these are little bands here so this one is not gonna pick up any unnecessary low-end frequency because it's mindful of the space that it's in and how it's mounted so that's always something you got to consider and yeah it just happens a lot I mean can't really fault everybody for not having those setups perfect especially if they're not doing it all the time but yeah I've run into it to you on air okay alright startup Sanatana with frequency perspective his voice can be unique where one can think of some kind of biometric voice authentication are you asking if voices can be unique enough or by yeah I mean sure that being said you know sonically digitally as I've shown in our spectral frequency display while voices definitely have unique prints there's also ways that you can modify and modulate your own to sound like another so this is one of those things that you know is one of the very hot topics right Henrik is saying sm57 versus md 421 haha and I have my other favorite actually the sennheiser md 441 I've got it sitting over there one of my all-time favorite mics for voice and for snare drum recording actually yeah Bluetooth speakers and bass monsters yep mm-hmm all right yes sir so your slither to ravenclaw nice all right okay let's see what else have we got here okay Road procaster user they're nice Tim okay all right so let's go to the next one so you've heard the 4050 kind of get an overall idea of the sound of that one let's cut over to the shore sm58 now again what's unique about this one not only because it's just one of the most common and recognizable microphones in the world is that first and foremost again this being a dynamic mic you really want to get up on it when you're singing into it now when a lot of people that I know who've purchased things like the sm7 many of them have written to me and they've said like hey I can't get enough gain out of this thing and I went to buying things like a cloud lifter and stuff like that which gives you additional gain and yes again if you're trying to go into some sound cards they don't they just don't have enough gain the preamp circuitry it's just not good enough in the old days when you had external preamps you never had this problem with dynamic mics we have this problem now in kind of the the nonlinear DAW podcast era because a lot of your sound devices simply don't provide enough so that's partially why you want to get up on this mic and you really want to be here you can be further away you can sort you can be like this you can even be like this but it's going to be a very different sound and when you're like this again depending upon the sound you're going for you need to be able to monitor yourself - that's actually how this mic wants to be used for voices okay it it colors the sound but in a by design kind of way now the other cool thing about this is again this is a built-in pop filter you can still incur popping peas implosives with this thing on here okay so you can use an additional filter in front of this however a common technique now this microphone has a a sibling this is the sm58 it also has a sibling known as the sm57 which curiously is usually about ten dollars more and it's used primarily for like miking instruments and things well if you take the capsule off this is actually what the 57 looks like this is now a 57 okay true there's there's no there's no difference they are effectively the same do I own 57s yes slightly different it's got this little kind of rotating capsule thing here but essentially if I want to use this to my camps and I do I take the windscreen off and you can't see here but there is there's foam inside of this so it's the same kind of foam thing that you would use for a windscreen or you know again if you're using like the the shotgun mics you know to prevent noise and such it's built into this microphone here okay sm58 I know this may be random but how do you adjust the volume in the beginning of the video or even the middle of a video to sound low and then rise up or fade up after someone is done talking and Manuel Ramos so you can do this with keyframes in audition or in in Premiere just real quickly in the case of this you know if we wanted to this is our volume envelope right here so I can simply click let's just say right here I mean I'm assuming you're talking about kind of fading in or just adjusting manual so I can click on this I can adjust the amplitude you can see as I do that it's giving me our value in decibels so if I drop this 11 DB and gradually have this increase we play this back hi this is Jason Levine and you were listening to the audio technica all right I don't know if that's what you were asking but that's how you can do it also if you right-click control click on the keyframes this is where you can turn them into bezzie A's or as they referred to in audition splines okay and then that gives you a a much smoother sinusoidal type fade versus a linear one okay all right so let's go ahead and mute this and now let's go to the 58 alright and let me make sure it looks like we've got good level on this okay you'll also notice when there's no talking minus 84 super low noise floor and that's with this this fan is cranking on this streaming system here again a lot of your USB variety condensers that's usually hovering around minus 60 in fact if anybody has noticed that throw it in the chat I'm curious I've seen a lot of again a lot more consumer e mics have higher noise floors by default a lot of that can be that the game is just not adjusted properly right very important and I've done this on a couple streams here but properly gain staging a microphone is not a trivial thing it is not it's not unlike calibrating a monitor you kind of need to know what you're doing to get it right otherwise while you can always amplify and post you might be amplifying noise which you don't want okay so there's there's an art to it alright let's record this 58 because we've got like nine minutes left time flies Jennifer Poole that's awesome the last audio recorder used only linear oh yeah absolutely so splines are wonderful and of course when you crossfade your little crossfade curves here too these can become splines just by dragging and then you have additional options when you hold down like command you'll see so this will give you sinusoidal let go of command control turns it into linear all right cool little keyboard shortcut right there okay all right here we go need some water okay all right coming to you live from the studio today in the desert this is the shore sm58 and as I mentioned I might be too close because I'm not monitoring myself but you really do want to get up on this mic and again you can back off of it like I do when I'm singing loud vocals but it's really meant to be captured with hot sound if you use this to mic instruments and things it's gonna be real thumpy real up close and a very good indicator of what it sounds like okay there is our waveform it's coming to here let's make it a little bit louder alright and let's take a quick listen to this coming to you live from the studio today in the desert this is the shore sm58 and as I mentioned I might be too close because I'm not monitoring myself but you really do want to get up on this mic and again you can back off of it like I do what I'm singing loud vocals but it's really meant to be captured with hot sound if you use this to mic instruments and things okay so right away you can probably notice that it's just it's not as it's not as bright necessarily but here's the thing with this if you were to go into something like your spectral frequency you can you can very clearly see while there seems to be a little bit of a dip around nineteen and a half to 22 kilohertz which you're not even going to hear it's recording frequency response all the way up to in this case you know 20 to 24 K alright so this will actually react quite nicely with a little bit of subtle EQ to bring out some of the high-end alright now similarly or dis similarly this is the can dancer Mike all right so look here right I mean this is kind of the fundamental difference remember the condenser microphones greater frequency response a lot more detail in the high end so look up here this is capturing everything right even though you're you can't even hear any of this up here but it's all there all right versus this one where there's just there's some dips right by Nature okay so this one again it's gonna be a little more forgiving with super bright super crunchy voices same with the sm7b and when you get right up on it you're still gonna capture enough of that high end so you can equalize it and bring it back and make it sound good okay however you want d Flynn's getting -66 nice that's pretty good - 66 is good people keep saying you have a face for radio what does that mean ah yeah and I rec you kid you kid alright alright any more questions here well being a little silent today all 832 of you but it's lovely to have you don't be shy ask ask away all right what's up Zachary okay so let's now go into this one here it's probably last one we're gonna be we're gonna have time to record maybe we'll do the USB one although it's not essential to record that because I think you get the idea this one is special because again the way it's mounted a sound rejection from the rear super clean and just very just it's very film like this mic so let's go ahead I've already got the input selected on this one and let's give it a go all right here we are and ready here we go what's up oh yes mystic in Las Vegas I know good to see you man all right hello thank you so much for joining me and welcome to today's live stream right now we are featuring the Sennheiser MKH 416 super cardioid shotgun microphone this is an industry standard and the key to making this sound good with very little tweaking is just having laser precision when you're focusing the capsule of the mic which is front address to the front side of the person's mouth if you get that dialed in you will have perfect sound reproduction every time okay so again very nice very clean looking waveform their condensers right full program material all the way up to the top oh by the way it's also yeah it's also worth pointing out here so again bass roll-off right if we look at the low end there's nothing captured down here it's still capturing all the low-end fundamentals of my voice because I have a low voice but it doesn't have any of that Rumble enon sense that you just don't need right and similarly with the MK h4 16 same deal all right right around 80 it just starts to fall off looks like we have a little plosive right there and maybe one right there not a problem we could come in here and just knock those right out you'd never know they were there in the first place maybe right here - okay very cool all right let's take a quick listen to this let's amplify it like we did the others so it's a little bit louder for the stream and here we go alright hello thank you so much for joining me and welcome to today's live stream right now we are featuring the Sennheiser MKH 416 super cardioid shotgun microphone this is an industry standard and the key to making this sound good with very little tweaking is just having laser precision when you're focusing the capsule of the mic which is front address okay I love the sound of this right I mean it doesn't it sounds like it doesn't even need to be edited it's just clean it has all of the right present frequencies for voice and it just it just sounds right that's why this one is a standard now I see Alexei was just asking which DSLR shotgun mic would you recommend now Sennheiser has some this one is this this is again being an entry standard it's not inexpensive so there are inexpensive alternatives to those and you know you can definitely check those out what you want to really look for is to make sure that they have preferably supercardioid or hyper-cardioid patterns a lot of the shotgun mics consumer a ones actually have cardioid pickup pattern and again the only issue there is that it's it's just picking up a lot of sound from the sides you really want it to be laser-focused alright so you know Road makes a bunch of them that are very good and fairly inexpensive against Anheuser I think is the EM cage maybe 600 I forget the model numbers there's a lot of good ones out there there's even one that came with one of my zoom recorders zoom makes their own little shotgun that's pretty good you know anything in the end the to two hundred to three hundred dollar range for a shotgun most of them are pretty good I mean that's the difference now is that most of the stuff works pretty well you know yes there are differences there are variances but overall the stuff is way better than it used to be and for a far more affordable price alright and look at all those cool rainbow buttons at the top nice start up Santana nice Soria I feel like I hear more of the esses compared to the audio technica am I crazy now you you may again I wasn't quite listening back full it's it's possible that this one may be again accentuating yes because again I've got it right focused on my mouth here so I might want to yes attenuate or bring down you usually find the s sounds approximately the fundamental frequency is 5600 Hertz to 6300 Hertz so somewhere in that range I would use a parametric equalizer I would sweep to find it and then I would cut that frequency out but my friends unfortunately that is all the time we have so thank you so much for joining me of course you'll be able to watch the replay right after this we've got the illustrator creative challenge coming up next so until then stick around have a great rest of your morning afternoon evening wherever you are in the world and we'll see you again next time take care everybody bye bye you

Channel: Jason Levine

Views: 3,044

Keywords: how to choose a microphone, what is the best microphone, how to record your voice, what microphone should I use, what is the best microphone for podcast, microphone, podcasting, jason levine, beatlejase, tutorial, adobe audition, how to select a mic, how to pick a good microphone

Id: Zdr6HRw3BCc

Length: 57min 8sec (3428 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020