Aug 28, 2023
Perhaps it's a quirk in your 416 that sits perfectly with your voice. Is it an anomaly in your room that adds that special something to your voice, or is it where you position the mic that just has you humming?
A signature sound isn't essential, but most engineers have one (achieved through compression and eq admittedly). There's no reason your home studio can't have one too. "As long as it sounds good, it is good" as the saying goes...
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And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..
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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
Hunter S Thompson
#rode #rodemicrophones
Summary
In this episode of Pro Audio Suite, industry professionals George
Wittam, Robert Marshall, Andrew Peters, and Darren Robbo Robertson,
discuss crucial aspects of audio engineering. The show offers
valuable insights into microphone usage, including a unique story
about an unusual microphone that became a signature sound for its
user despite initial concerns over its broken state. The hosts
stress the personal nature of microphone choice while exploring
factors that affect sound quality, from room attributes to mic
placement. They specifically mention the unique attributes of the U
87 cardioid and 818 microphones. They also promote a deal on
Tribooth using the code PAP 200 and recommend their audio services.
Geological technical support and ongoing discussions are available
through a dedicated Facebook group. For more information about Pro
Audio Suite's hosts and their services, listeners can visit
theproaudiosuite.com.
#ProAudioTips #UniqueMicrophoneSounds
#TechTalkWithProAudioSuite
Timestamps
[00:00:00] Intro: Meet the Pro Audio Suite Team
[00:00:30] Special Offer: Discounted Tribooth & Personalized
Demo
[00:01:11] Segment: George Talks About Unique Mic
Problems
[00:02:50] Tips: Importance of Room & Mic Placement
[00:09:48] Mic Review: The Magic of U 87 Cardioid
[00:14:50] Comparison: Eight One Eight vs Neumann TLM 170 R
[00:19:22] Closing: Thanks and Invitation to Join our Community
Transcript
Speaker A: Y'all ready?,Speaker B: Be history.,Speaker C: Get
started.,: Welcome.,Speaker C: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone, to the Pro
Audio Suite.,: These guys are professional and motivated with tech.
To the Vo stars George Wittam, founder of Source Elements Robert
Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and
global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo Austrian audio making
passion heard. Source elements. George the tech. Wittam and robbo
and AP's. International demo. To find out more about us, check
thepro audiosuite.com.,Speaker C: Learn up. Learner. Here we
go.,Speaker A: Here you go. Ready?,: Welcome to another Pro audio
suite. We're your guests, Robo, Andrew and George. And I'm Robert.
And you can get a good deal on a tribooth with PAP 200. And you
should have Andrew and Robbo do your demo, by the way, and let's
get on with it.,: Okay. It's actually trip 200, but yeah, nice work
there, Robert. You missed your calling there.,Speaker B: I tell you
what, jesus, you were.,: Looking so good there for a minute and you
just fell at the bloody.,Speaker B: I think your job's safe, AP.,:
Yeah, you call this a job? Really high binded. Now, George, you
were telling us about an experience, once again at one voice with
somebody who had a microphone that people were complaining about
being broken, but it's kind of become his sound. What was the
story?,Speaker A: Yeah, he told me that and again, I haven't heard
this mic yet, so I would like to hear it at some point. I told him,
hey, give me the audio and I should give him credit. I think maybe
I shouldn't. Yeah, no, I should give him credit. It was Chad Fisher
and he's worked with me in the past. I think he just finished
building a studio, too, that looked pretty impressive. But he said
that he's got a 416 or 41 six. That is sounding odd. According to
folks that he has sent the audio to that know the mic. He has said
that they were concerned that maybe something is up with that mic.
And I said, did you buy it used? Was it damaged? Was it
counterfeit? All those things could be true. He said, no, I bought
it from one of the big companies. The big companies. And I said
fascinating. Well, you could certainly reach out to them and ask
them to give you another one and exchange it. Or you could look at
this as a unique experience and realize that this is the mic that
you're booking on and that people like the sound and you may not
want to muck with it. So I said, literally, just engrave your
initials in that thing. And this is your mic. It's your unique
sound. And if you want to get another one because you want to have
a proper one or whatever, a regular one, go for it. But this is a
unique mic for you. Don't mess with it. Does anybody else have a
mic with a quirk or character that they choose to keep using that
you know?,: Yeah, well, I was going to say I won't mention the name
because I don't want us to get sued or anything. But we've talked
about this off air quite a lot. But a very famous American record
producer has an AKG C Twelve an original C Twelve which was sent to
AKG for testing when they were building the capsule which has now
become the Austrian Audio Capsule, the CKR Twelve. Anyway, this
famous record producer's C Twelve, which he absolutely loved, he
loved used it on everything, was actually broken, but he had no
idea that it was broken. He just loved the sound of this broken
microphone.,Speaker B: That's the beauty of audio, though, isn't
it, is that beauty is in the ear of the beholder. And if he loved
the sound that that mic made, it doesn't make him any less or
anything else. Just a sound he liked. And that was his sound. So
good on him.,: I reckon if it sounds good, it is good, right?,: It
is, exactly. Because nothing sounds the same and it's funny. People
go, oh well, I've got a U 67 and blah, blah, blah. It's like does
it sound like any other U 67? Probably not. I doubt it very
much.,Speaker B: I don't know whether George has any experience
with this, but I've had sessions with people who've said, pick your
amazing multi thousand dollar mic, it could be any of them. They
go, I've got a such and such, and you hear them in the room that
they're in or where they've got it placed or whatever, and it
sounds like shit. Well, I'd rather, to be quite honest have you got
a four one six.,: That we can just thing is the room yeah, exactly.
That's classic.,: Yeah, the room is key, but also it's like what
complements your voice?,Speaker B: What defines your sound.,: And
if you're.,: Working it's true, a mic is a very personal
choice.,Speaker A: The room is key, but the mic placement is key.
And it depends a lot on the kind of mic. I do find that the shotgun
mic, 40 116 especially, is tricky to get the placement really
awesome and the mic will change its sound quite a lot based on
placement. Whereas a large diaphragm condenser cardioid mic will
not change nearly as drastically based on the placement. It will
certainly increase proximity effect if you get too close, but you
can move quite a bit, side to side, up and down without a huge
change.,: In the sound, without falling in different places of the
pickup pattern. Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things about
a 41 six is you have to stay consistently in front of it because it
drops I mean, that's the whole point is it drops off significantly
as you get to the side. But the problem is that that's not linear,
it's colored, it's different when you get it doesn't drop off
evenly.,Speaker A: Yeah. And it has this weird pickup nodes on the
sides of the mic. If you look at the pickup pattern.,: Or in the
back, if you look.,Speaker A: At the pickup pattern, polar pattern,
I should say diagram, you'll see it looks almost like a sword
because it's long in the top, short has a tail on the bottom and
these little things that stick out on the side. So it's definitely
an OD pickup pattern.,: Out of interest. So if you're setting up a
41 six, if you imagine the talent standing in front of the
microphone, where do you actually place the mic and what area of
the person do you point the mic at?,: The nose, just above the
plosive line.,Speaker A: I mean, the tip of the mic is right above
the plosive line, but where is it aiming?,: Yeah, at the mouth,
basically. But just keep the diaphragm away from the gush of air
from the plosives.,: Because I've been to so many different studios
where the 41 six is pretty well everywhere anyway in this business
and there is no consistency with the way the engineers set up the
mic.,Speaker B: Well, see, every engineer's got his own sound, too.
Every engineer's got his own preference for where the MIC's aiming
and all that sort of stuff.,: It kind of depends on where you are.
If you're in a horrible sounding booth, then just get into it and
try to nullify the booth compared to the ratio of your voice. And
then you can just EQ out the proximity effect because the 40 116,
being a shotgun, has quite a big proximity effect to it.,Speaker A:
It's still a different it's still not quite the big proximity
effect, though you're going to get from a large diaphragm cardioid
because you can get so much closer to the capsule.,: Well, because
the capsule is way up the microphone in the 416 yeah.,Speaker A:
It's not near the tip. It's up halfway up the tube of the mic.,:
Right. If you were able to virtually get your mouth there, then the
proximity effect would probably be insane.,Speaker A: Oh, for sure.
Well, if you use a Harvard cardioid or cardioid version of that
mic, which would be the I guess they didn't make one, but the newer
series, the MKH no, the is it called the MKH 80 series 80208
030-804-0805.,: It's probably like MKH 20. Maybe one of those might
be similar to the yeah.,Speaker A: Or Neumann 184 or any one of
those pencil mics. The proximity effect is massive, but you just
have to be really careful not to pop the mic because the capsule is
right there, really easy to pop.,: There is no filter. There's
nothing there at all.,: Sounds a bit like you and I, Robert. No
filter.,: Tourette's. Tourette's, Mike.,: Yeah, but it's funny, the
41 six, I've had them directly in front of me pointing, as you
said, above the sort of forehead kind of thing, pointing to the
mouth. I've had them pointing to the chest, I've had them coming in
from the side, all sorts of different pointing to the chest.,:
Chest, yeah.,Speaker B: Wow.,: I've seen people who do the side
thing and the sort of nose thing. If you want to thin it out, you
just kind of get it away from the mouth and a little bit more on
the head and they'll get a little bit brighter for you. But I've
not seen the chest.,: Yeah, that was years ago. I remember someone
pointing and they had it set up in front of me and it was like
basically probably about almost a foot away from my head and
pointing down past my face.,: Excuse me, pointing at your chest?,:
Yeah, my laundry is done. Yeah, pointing at my chest must have been
so woofy. It was certainly bassy, that's for sure.,: I mean, that's
the problem that you have when you have, like, a lavalier mic
that's too far under the chin and you lose all the top, all the
high end. You have to kind of clip a lavalier mic a little bit
lower down, so you get some because if not, the chin creates an
acoustic shadow of the s's. And the other detail.,Speaker A: I was
in a booth today, one of my clients whose studio designed, and he
has a 41 six and a U 87. And he says sometimes I'll go to the U 87
because I just kind of get mic fatigue working on a 41 six all the
time because of its tiny sweet spot and all this stuff. And I said,
hey, by the way, he's like, but sometimes I use that mic and I hear
a little bit too much reflection off the console below and display
next to the mic, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, well, do you
know about the secret microphone that's inside of U 87? He's like
and I said, Flick the little switch on the front to figure eight.
And he tried it and he was.,: Like, Whoa, drop everything from the
holy cow, that's crazy.,Speaker A: I said, now stand on the side
and talk into it. And it was like he was blown away. I said, yeah,
this is an entirely different mic and a different sound from the U
87 cardioid or the 41 six. Really, it's a third mic you already
had, you just didn't know and try it out and experiment.,: It's a
much softer sound with a bigger proximity.,Speaker A: It's more
ribbon like, dare I say.,: I mean, the ribbon mics really cancel
out the side because the problem with what do you call it, the
figure eight on the U 87 is it's two capsules and they are a little
bit apart, right? So they don't cancel out at all frequencies. But
you get a ribbon mic, that thing is infinitely thin and it really
does just vanish to the side.,Speaker A: But I'll tell you, you
don't need it to fully vanish to be an advantage. If you have
anything reflective below or to the side, it will pretty well kill
that. It's great. It just focuses the sound. I was like, Check this
out. And he was like, Whoa, that's really cool.,: You've seen those
diagrams where they go through the polar patterns and you can see
them continuous because people think of polar patterns as being
discreet. But really polar patterns are a continuum from omni to
cardioid. And then it goes to figure eight. And in there like your
hypercardioid is kind of between a figure eight and a cardioid, for
example, I think. And that's why the hypercardioid's got the node
in the back. And so it's not like a good tube mic. If you've played
with a good tube mic, the polar pattern is a continuous
knob.,Speaker A: That's right, yeah.,: And some of the better
pencil mics are offered in what they call the wide
cardioid.,Speaker A: Oh, yeah.,: And those are very natural
sounding. They kind of have the naturalness of more close to the
naturalness of an omni with still some focus, some proximity
effect. A little bit. Yeah. You can't avoid it, but yeah, it's like
polar patterns are not one, two, three, there's an infinite number
between the.,: Omni and but the thing I actually talk about polar
patterns and stuff like that. If you have the OC eight, one eight
and you get the dongle that patches into the back, even better.
Yeah.,: You can play with the polar patterns on a frequency basis
with that polar pattern.,: Well, you're talking about pretty cool.
The other part when you've used the two XLRs but this is if you.,:
Use the two capsules.,: Yeah, but if you use the dongle, the
bluetooth dongle and use the app on your phone, it's not just like
clicking from one pattern to another, you're just sliding from one
pattern to another.,: Right.,: So you can do a mix of so I'm
talking about yeah, which is.,: What I'm talking about. But even
better, you can record both of them and then in your daw after the
fact, you can play with the polar pattern after you record yeah.,:
But that's if you're using the two USBs not USBs, yes, the two
XLRs.,: And then you have to use the plugin afterwards.,: But the
plugin different plugin. If you get the bluetooth dongle that goes
in the back of the mic, then you get a plugin that goes on your
phone and it just gives you the polar pattern.,: That's what it
is.,: The idea is that if the MIC's up on a boom pole, instead of
bringing the thing backwards and forwards, you can do it from your
phone.,: So the advantage of that multi frequency polar pattern
designer is you could have a booth with a problematic low end, and
especially in a corner. Maybe it's the only corner that you can put
the mic where you have enough space, but you can treat the low
frequency with, say, a figure eight. Get the mic so it rejects the
weird bounce back to the side. And then in the upper frequencies,
you can open them up to a cardioid or a wide cardioid where it
sounds more natural, gives you a little bit more space to move
about without having such a critical sweet spot on the microphone.
And you can kind of have the benefits of a figure eight where you
need it, have the benefits of a cardioid and a wide cardioid where
you need them, and really play around with the polar pattern to fit
your exact need, instead of just having one polar pattern across
the whole spectrum. And then you have to deal with the
nonlinearities where you don't want them to be.,: It'd be good if
you could actually use that thing post or pre print, so you could
actually set and forget if you got a trouble. Oh, you can do it.
I've never tried it.,: Well, you can just record both capsules and
then you can put the plugin on there and design it away. So if
you're always recording both, in fact, you could even do it where
you could automate the plugin. So on certain words, if you go
really low, you could even change the where were we parameters if
you were really going crazy. But yeah, you can definitely put that
plugin on a post process. But to do that and make use of it, you
have to record both capsules separately.,: Correct.,: You have to
use the two XLRs. But that's the whole point of that Mike, is that
it is literally that flexible.,: Yeah. I still like the app,
though, that I find really handy. Instead of clicking from one
pattern to another, you can actually just slide across an infinite
amount of mixtures of everything.,: Like the old classic tube
mics.,: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.,: You say it's a great mic when you
look at the price point.,Speaker B: Well, absolutely. And also
we're talking about your distinctive sound. That polar pattern
thing sort of gives you the chance to make as well, doesn't
it?,Speaker A: Really?,: That's right, indeed.,Speaker A: If you
use the Polar designer Bluetooth tool, then it's locked into that
fifth setting. It has a magic fifth setting that becomes your
pattern.,: You can set it yeah, it's in.,Speaker A: The firmware,
which is great.,: Does it do it by the frequencies, too, or is it
just by the so you have to use the plugin to get the frequency per
frequency. That'd be amazing if you could bake it in there. And
then you just have your own microphone, your sound, but still like
what I was going to say, the price point of the eight one eight.
And you look at it compared to like a U 87.,Speaker A: Actually, a
better mic to compare it to is actually the Neumann TLM 170 R. And
I mentioned that one because that one's come up a little bit more
often. One of my clients bought one a while ago and she hasn't used
it yet. And she said, I bought it because Disney uses it and she
does a lot of Disney. So I said I was wondering why. So I looked at
the frequency response of the 170 R and I saw it was definitely a
lot more of a flat response. It's much flatter. And so they want
that really just uncolored sound. But that's a multi pattern with
more choices. The U 87 just has the classic figure eight omni and
card. This one's got more inter, it's got hyper cardioid and a few
other things. And it's not a bargain mic.,: 123456 no use. That
thing is $2,000. It's more money used than the eight one
eight.,Speaker A: It's still quite spendy on the Neumann in the
Neumann lineup. And the only thing that competes from Neumann on
price would be the 107, I think is what it's called TLM 107.,: But
that's a single pattern.,Speaker A: I think that's the multi
pattern one. They have a TLM series or is it a 104?,: The 107 is
around at least used. It's around 1300 or $1,200.,Speaker A: That's
a multi pattern, though, right? I don't see yeah, that's the multi
pattern. It's got a funky little digital control joystick on it.
It's really OD on the back of the mic.,: Is that how it does its
it's.,Speaker A: Actually a multifunction joystick and that
controls the pad high pass and polar pattern by flicking the stick
around. And I'd say in terms of quality, it's somewhere in the 103
to 100 and it actually might be more like the 102 in terms of what
capsule it uses and stuff. So, yeah, that's the only thing that's
in any way similar to the 12345 pattern.,: It's about the same
price point as an eight one eight, but a little more.,Speaker A:
It's a bit more.,: Yeah, it's $200 more or so.,: Yeah.,Speaker A:
So bang for the buck. That eight one eight is still it's
outstanding. Outstanding.,: Yeah. It really is a killer
mic.,Speaker B: I'm just looking at the Ma one. I don't know if you
guys have ever seen that. It looks like a butt plug.,: Have you
been using those again?,: Yeah, sorry. We can stop him talking out
of his eyes.,: Sorry.,Speaker B: It was the first thing that came
into my mind.,: There's the out.,: Yeah.,Speaker C: Well, that was
fun. Is it over?,: The Pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and
Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew
Peters and mixed by Robo Got your own audio issues? Just ask
robo.com with tech support from.,Speaker C: George, the tech
Wittam.,: Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the
conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a
topic or just say G'day. Drop us a note at our website,
theproudiosuite.com.