Let’s talk about microphone techniques.  I work with a lot of singers. When I work with them, I am always surprised the little they seem to know about how microphones work or that they have a part in getting a successful sound in a live environment.

So, I made a video called Microphones 101 to teach how the new (and not-so-new) microphones work and how to get the best sound in a live venue.  *Watch the full video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCFeVznYFNE&t=15s

The first mic we will look at is a kind of beat up Sennheiser wireless. It’s a G1 series wireless with a condenser head. This mic has its own particular group of things that go on with it.

So, this mic has some good and bad characteristics depending on what you’re looking for. When you have no EQ applied to it, you’ll notice there’s some serious sibilance* in this microphone and a fair amount of low frequency handling noise.

DEFINITION: sibilance = a hissing sound

1. The first thing a singer should be aware of is whether the mic they are using is making noise when they move it around.

2. And the second thing the need to know is where do they hold the mic when they are singing.

This seems to be a problem for some singers. One of the events that I work at regularly involves 8 singers, all of whom are quite animated on stage. They move around a lot. They do a lot of things and, as a result, the positioning of their microphones is very inconsistent. Microphones are designed to be used at about a two to four inch working distance in front of the capsule. (i.e. their mouths should be no more than 4 inches away from the mic.)

If you take that mic and tilt it, as some people do, to a 90-degree angle, you’ll find that there is a relatively large shift in the response of the mic. Some wind noises change frequency to very low frequencies.

This image shows frequency spectrum where you can see the different frequencies being affected with lows and highs. If you don’t know that, then you are probably not a sound guy, you are probably a singer. The important thing to remember is that the position of the mic is a big deal.

The other thing with the microphone is that gain is related to the position. So, if I hold the mic just 2 inches from my mouth and then I double that working distance, I just went from 2 inches to 4 inches. That movement will cause a huge drop in level, with an attendant change in frequency response. This is what is known as “proximity effect.”

Proximity Effect

Most microphones exhibit proximity effect to some degree, some more than others. Condensers like the 865 head have a lot of proximity. And if you get really close to the capsule, it gets really kind of crazy. Then, if you get extra close to the capsule along with moving it at funny angles, it gets even weirder.

So, when mixing one of the first things we do with condensers is we typically roll off the really low frequencies by putting a low-cut filter on them. And then, once that is done, we start looking at other things as getting rid of sibilance that is on the microphone. Now the singer has a microphone that is a little more neutral, but if they back off the mic, they are gone. In actuality, when the gain drops down to 20 DB below everybody else, it’s a problem.

What I like to do, and not everybody agrees with this, is make it where if they get too far away from the mic, it turns them off. In other words, the gate just turned them off.

Why?  Well, when you have 8 singers on stage and you are trying to blend their voices (I deal with this regularly) they are getting so far away from the mic that effectively their voices disappear. You would think that the fact that they no longer hear themselves in the monitors would signal to them that something is wrong. But typically, they ignore it. So, the sound engineer has a singer who is not cognizant of what is going on. At that point, I would rather have their mic off, than having it pick up random noise from other things on stage. It is a matter of preserving the overall good of the audience’ experience.

To recap:  working distance is very important and performers need to be aware that, if the working distance is not reasonable, they will not only have tone problems, they will have an, “I left the mix” problem.

Working distance is the first thing to look at. The second is a consistent use of the microphone. One of the more fashionable mic handling styles with some singers, first popularized by rap stars, is cupping the hand over the microphone.

Cupping your hand over a microphone does a number of things.

1. It changes the frequency response.
2. It changes the gain.
3. It changes a lot of things.

As you watch the video, you will notice the big boost around a hundred, two hundred, 1K 2K, and  that it gets kind of nasally sounding. Part of that depends on how far you cup your hand. This technique can go from several stages of partial covering till the mic is almost completely covered.

If I wanted to fix these things, I could. If the singer wanted to use the mic the same way all night, I could kick in a compressor to level out the gain problems I’m running into because of all of this. But if that singer suddenly decides to go back to holding the mic normally again, everything changes. Those abrupt changes just do not work well for those of us who care about the overall mix. This is just one example of the problems that happen with singers on stage who inconsistently handle the microphone, not to mention handling noise that also goes on. Add to it that you have eight singers all doing this, you have a lot of unpredictable modifications in the mix.

So avoid the gain changes that occur with microphone working distance. If you are going to be moving around a lot, learn to move your body with your head, which means you cannot have your head going in different directions than your microphone.

Handling a microphone is like playing an instrument.

It is kind of like playing an instrument. If you’re a guitar player, your fingers are supposed to be on the strings when you are playing chords. So you really have to work on this. Many singers seem to, at least the ones I get to work with, ignore all of this. And then they wonder why there are no altos. There are no tenors. There’s no, this there’s no that. The other ones that I really don’t like for other reasons, when I turn this compress around, before I do, this are the ones who eat the microphone.

Now in this particular situation, the gain of the mic is already too high to get away with this. So, I’m clipping the input. Now I’m just backing off that. And then I’m using the compressor and I’ll have to use some makeup gain to get back the gain I’m reducing. But when you get really, really close to one of these microphones, I will have to turn the EQ back on to try to fix the stuff that’s happening by being really, really close to this microphone.

So, there’s a lot that goes on with the 865 p microphone when you get really close to it. So, you end up with a curve that looks pretty bizarre when you get really up there. That sibilance peak, while it’s still there it is less prevalent, and you get all of this low, mid frequency energy going on. The way you fix it is that is you use the mic properly.

So, this is one style of microphone. Let’s talk about one that is radically different. And if you have singers who, for example, like to cup their hands over the mic, is a better choice.

It is a Beyer TCX 58, which is their kind of version of an SM 58. This mic with EQ off is very neutral sounding. Now, if I were to cup my hand over the microphone, there is nowhere near the dramatic effect you get with the condensers, which is one of my contentions. A lot of times people will walk in and they’re used to doing something with the mic they used to use. Then the sound company shows up with a different kind of microphone and hands it to the same artist and they decide to do what they always do. And they don’t realize that they’ve gone from that to this.

And this is now a significant problem. Now you’ll notice also that this Beyer TCX 58 mic, although it has a lot of proximity effect when you get really close to it, it doesn’t have nearly as much. So, the shift with gain is not as hard to manage. If you wanted to work it out with a compressor, you can actually get the compressor to manage the gain a lot better with this microphone.

So you get on this mic and then when you back away from it, it turns you back up. So you can get some things that aren’t nearly as dramatic as you get with proximity effect on a different microphone. The other thing with this one is if you do wanna put in a low cut filter, it solves the low frequency problem pretty much entirely.

Singers => Learn Your Hardware

So, I guess what was trying to get across in this short video is that singers really need to learn their hardware.

They need to learn what works, what doesn’t work. They need to learn how to follow themselves around. And if they’re really singing, dancing type folks, they either have to go to a headset or they have to do something else. But when you’re dealing with handheld microphones, you have a responsibility to make sure you’re rendering properly. And, if you don’t, the sound guy can’t deal with that with eight people.

“Hey, where did I go?“

So wondering why you disappear in the mix is something you shouldn’t be doing, which is why I do this thing where, if you get away too far, in my world I just turn you off. And when you have a bunch of singers on stage and you’re gating them all heavily like that, there is obviously band noise on stage, You have to gate it within that realm to get that to work. But what turning some voices off prevents is picking up a lot of distant noise that you really don’t want in your mix.

So, gating is one good way to solve that problem. And I’ve noticed the singers, at least the ones that I have worked with, they often don’t even know that they left the mix, which shows that they’re really not paying attention …but that’s a whole nother story. And we can talk about that, maybe, some other time.

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I wanted to do a video about the most difficult thing about soundproofing a home studio. We could call it “What’s That Noise?”  So, what’s the big deal about that? Well, oddly enough, this story starts on the roof of an apartment building. If that sounds weird, check out our “Kokomo Hum” video; then you will understand what I’m talking about.

The most challenging part with a home studio is low frequency control. You can get isolation for vocals and that type of thing somewhat easily. However, when you have base drum, bass guitar, any low frequency sounds that you don’t want seeping into the rest of the house — or low frequency noises from upstairs that you don’t want filtering into your studio (which you may not hear with your headset mic) — there is the challenge!  

For the backstory, listen to The Kokomo Hum.

You will notice in the soundproofing video that I am wearing headphones. Computer speakers typically do not pick up the elusive low frequency sounds that we are featuring so, when watching the video, you should put on a set of good headphones or in-ears to be able to hear the type of low frequencies.

Next, and unrelated to that, we were called to come to an apartment building. Residents were complaining about a humming noise that was occurring in several apartments in the same complex. It was a 3-story apartment building with dozens and dozens of apartments that were not hearing this noise. For those residents who were hearing it, though, the noise was annoying and impossible for them to track down.

So, we were called in to solve the mystery and tell them how to get it to stop. (You will want to go over to our soundproofing video now, wearing headphones, to get a much better perspective on this.)

 

And just so you know, we actually are going to get to why this has something to do with soundproofing a home studio and many other things. So, we arrived at the apartments where the hum was occurring, and we took a look at the roof above them. It was lined with air conditioning units — dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And they were all mounted the same way. They were mounted to a rail, sitting on another rail, sitting on a roof. They are just air conditioning units like you may have outside of your house. Now the ones outside of your house don’t do this into your house or you would probably leave your home.

So we discovered the air conditioning units were how the noise was getting there. The next step was to find what was causing it in the first place.  So when went into the apartments that were having the noise problem, we definitely heard the noise.

We went up on the roof and, when you’re walking around the roof you don’t really hear it, but you feel it in your feet. When you would get your ear up really close to one of these air conditioning units — really, really close – you could hear the noise.  When you would get your head down lower towards the bottom, it would go away. On the roof, you could hear it and feel it in the floor. Now what we got into is that we found that the units were mounted on rubber vibration isolators. They have a high enough deflection that typically 48 Hertz wave, which is what we were hearing, would be damped by them.

However, the problem was that they had them sitting on rubber vibration isolators. That seems pretty good, other than they could fall off the rail, which is a whole nother issue. The problem turned out to be this simple. They fastened them to the rail with an angle bracket that tied them to the rail.

So a single screw in four places on each unit was enough to put the unwanted low frequency noise into the apartment downstairs. We disconnected it from the rail and the result in the apartment downstairs was:  no noticeable noise.

When it comes to doing home studios, the likely challenge will be => vibration.

Note:  if you’re listening carefully to the video on good headphones, you can hear that it’s still there, but we had a 24 DB drop in level by simply disconnecting four screws. The takeaway is that when you get into doing home studios the challenge you are most likely to face is vibration.

When you try to do vibration isolation, no matter how you go about it, there are a lot of challenges. The first challenge is physical contact. If your walls are tied to your joists in the basement, you are going to have some issues. In this apartment scenario, there was other stuff going on that was kind of unusual and not easily understood. The entire roof here had many air conditioning units. They were all over the place. But there was only one apartment in the building that had the noise interference going on.  

So the question then is why, and it has to do with deflection and flexibility of the roof system. So, it was just the magic of math that in a particular spot up there in the roof, you ended up with this situation where all the right things came together, causing this frequency to show up in that apartment. And it was a little bit in the hallway outside it, but the neighboring apartments weren’t getting it. When we turned on all these other units, this was the unit that was for the apartment we were working on. When we turned on the other ones, it hardly changed at all. Uh, the other ones could activate it.

However, it didn’t matter which one on the rail did it. It was just this thing where this one place was a problem. So when people talk to us about designing a home studio with isolation or any kind of isolation, the challenge is always, how do you prevent isolation vibrant from occurring?

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This advice is primarily for theater folks who work in school districts. Are your auditoriums being renovated? It will be helpful for you to be aware of the design and bid process that you are entering into before things get too far along.  

First, there will be an architect on board and probably some engineering firms, as well. If part of the scope of the project includes stage rigging or lighting or audio or video or any of the technical parts of the auditorium, who will design that work? This is a very important consideration.

There are two paths you could take.

1. On one path, the architect hires a theater consultant for his team who stays with the job from get-go to the tail end, making sure everything is done properly.  That includes assuring that it is set up correctly and seeing to it that people are thoroughly trained on all the new equipment. The theater consultant is there, representing you the client, to make sure that everything goes the way you want it to.
2. The alternate path that they could take does not include a consultant and, instead, you get “vendor specs.” Now vendor specs are an interesting breed…this is how it works:

You hire an architectural firm which also has an engineering firm working for them. Typically, the electrical engineer on the team gets tasked with doing audio, video, and theatrical lighting. Admittedly, there are some electrical engineers who actually know something about this work but there are many who don’t.

 

So what exactly is a “Vendor?”

The electrical engineers who don’t have those skills set get a “vendor” involved. A vendor is a third party who often does have know-how, but they also sell equipment. That makes their role a little odd. Vendors will not be paid for their time in specifying the project. In a public bid market, they may or may not even win the job. It’s less than a 50/50 chance, depending on how many bidders are participating. So, they spend time specifying something that may make them no money at all. There is not a lot of incentive in that to follow up later.

As the client you should understand that the way a vendor spec works is the vendor, who actually does have some skill set, provides some information to the engineer who then transfers that to his drawings and specifications. Now, in some cases it may be done fairly well. In some cases, it may be very, very basic.

We’ve seen bids produced as simple as one drawing for an entire audio system with no information of how to actually connect things, where speakers should be located, how they should be mounted and aimed, etc. Video projection often is left with no indication of where the inputs and outputs are.  We have seen theatrical lighting systems labeled as an “LED par fixture”, and that’s as far as the description goes.  The whole spec can be generic. The chances of you getting what you truly want can be slim.

The complaint I have with vendor specs is two-fold:

1. It is wasting the time of someone who may never get paid for their participation which, as a consultant, I just object to. It is un-American.  As consultants we get paid for our involvement. And I think that is the way life should be. If, however, a vendor does get paid for their work, they are not supposed to bid that work.
2. If a vendor specifies a system the next issue becomes “if they lost the bid, who reviews his submittals after bid and someone else wants to substitute products?”  

I had this happen on a job recently, we created a design for a school district where we did all of the acoustical work for all of their auditoriums, and they wanted high quality acoustics in their auditorium. So, we made them pretty reactive meaning that anything that happens in the room is very audible.

A different designer did the theatrical lighting. Our design included the stage shell.  We asked the engineer to use a specific light in the stage shell because we were concerned about noise over the orchestra.

So, we had our fixture specified for the part of the job we cared about, the rest of it was handled by the engineer. Now to his credit, he worked with a manufacturer’s representative (ie. Vendor) who gave him good information and he specified some really good fixtures for the rest of the lighting system. The problem came in when the project was bid and the low bidder substituted everything, including the shell fixtures.

We chose these lights for a reason.

The LED lighting that was in our original design had been carefully selected for two aspects: one was color quality, and the other was fan noise. The substitute that ultimately was accepted by the electrical engineer was very noisy. This happened because he didn’t know any better, He was going by cut sheets, which don’t refer to noise.

After the lighting fixtures were installed, we were contacted by the owner since we had designed the acoustics. They wanted to know why the lights were so noisy. It was because no one ever showed us the submittal on what was being substituted. The engineer was dealing with us as if we were a vendor and they don’t contact vendors on substitutes.

When we found out what they had done, we had to explain “the rules of the road.” The LED lights that they had accepted could indeed be run quietly only if they were willing to accept 60% light output. With those particular lights, that is the only way to get the fan noise low enough.

Vendors are pretty much in it to make the sale. This is a real-life example of a vendor that made an alternate selection – his product – as a substitute in the bid so that he could do just that – make a sale. They made that sale based on lumen output, color rendering index, and other factors. There was nothing in the spec from the engineer about noise, so he didn’t consider that factor.

As consultants, all of our specs for LED lighting have specific requirements for noise, and we never would have agreed to the particular substitute that was accepted on this job.  We put our 2 cents in, and the owner is now trying to figure out how they’re going to resolve the problem.

The room was designed acoustically so that you could hear nuances and harmonics. To protect these excellent room acoustics, the client will now have to accept low light output or unwanted noise in the room.

In this particular case, using vendor specs was kind of awkward. There were 2 vendors involved: the original one and the one for the substituted product. If the engineer had gone back to the original vendor’s rep asking what he thought of the substitute, he obviously wasn’t going to like it as it cuts him out of a sale.

So, both sides of that road are kind of rough. You’ve got people who haven’t been paid and lost the job. You have other people who are interested in getting paid and that happens if they make a sale. This is a scenario where lots of things can go wrong, and the client suffers.

Consultants work for YOU!

In our opinion if a customer, such as a school district, cares about the performance of all their systems in their auditorium, they need to have consultants on board that work for them, or work for the architect, and are not part of any sales organization. 

That was an example of a problem with lighting. In audio, we have seen even worse situations. We have seen people take a design from a vendor which might have been somewhat well done, but then allowed substitutions of everything, including where the speakers would be located.

“Which way does it go?”

Most recently we were in an auditorium where they substituted a speaker that was completely inappropriate. Then they decided that positioning a pair in the front of the auditorium in the corners, a pair halfway down the auditorium against the sidewalls and a pair in the rear corner of the auditorium firing forward would be a really good idea. Mind you, the particular loudspeaker they had specified has its own a wacky coverage pattern to begin with.

No, this was not surround sound. These speakers were not processed, independently tuned, delayed in any manner. They were all just running in unison.

It was like an audio “hall of mirrors”!

So, it was kind of like a “hall of mirrors” effect when you got into the room. It was just bad. So, we were called in to figure out why they were hearing all these echoes in the room and we had to give them the grim news.

The problem was multi-faceted. It was not just where all the speakers had been located but what they were and how they interacted with the room. By the time we got involved, they already owned it all, had accepted it and now were stuck with it.

A word to the wise in public bid situations is that someone must specify clearly what you, as the end user, want and that person should never be one who is also selling product. They should be someone knowledgeable whose sole interest is what you, the customer, wants and not what they would like to sell to you.

Consultants do have preferences. We might like a particular audio console or lighting console but if you like a different one, as an end-user, our job as a consultant is to get you what you want, not to get you what we want.

Please Get Qualified Consultants

So be sure to have the architect get qualified consultants on board.  Better architectural firms automatically do this because they know the benefit of having us on their team.  With some architectural firms, you will have to force the issue. (their engineers insist to them that they know what to do…..)

There have been times that we have kind of been thrown at some architects. They didn’t want to hire a consultant, but the end user was savvy enough to insist on it. They knew from experience that they did not want to leave this part of the project to the engineer, or to a vendor.

In defense of engineers, there are some who really do have more than a hobby-interest in audio, video and lighting and that is awesome – but they are rare.

 

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