Hey guys, this is actually my professional field I've been doing sound fx, field recording, foley and music for tv shows, videogames, albums for about 14 years now and i made a living through this only...so I'd like to share with you a very important hint about working with microphones that I learned with years of experiences and that made my life a lot simpler and which is very easy to understand and to apply...Even for FilmMakers :D Just Kidding!!!


When placing a microphone for best effective sound placement (Not Aesthetic but efficient and balanced sound frequency wise so that you won't need to correct much later on, except for volume and noise reduction) you should always think of the sound source you are capturing with your mic as a Flame of Fire, a Sound-Flame...

The tip of a fire-flame is always the hottest part and you want to capture the hottest part with your mic...

If you put the mic too close (within the flame) the sound gets muddy ( proximity effect ) too far from the tip and you'll have a lot of ambience sound and you'll miss a lot of the frequencies that are in the voice of your actor or in the details of your sound source ( the Sound-flame won't be hot enough ).


So what you are looking for with mic placement is always the tip of the Flame of your Sound...

Off course, the bigger the flame the further you'll have to put the microphone to keep the sound nice and natural...

So if your source is really loud...like an explosion or a gunshot, the idea is to have your mic far from the source at the tip of the sound-flame NOT AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE...otherwise you ll just get a POK kind of sound...


And if you are tracking soft dialog ( a smaller/quieter Sound-Flame )...you'll need to get closer to the tip of the Sound-Flame...


The worst thing you can do is to always put the mic at the same distance just because it looks nice, or because it is not framed in your camera shot...a microphone mostly cheap ones transform the sound but they all work pretty nicely if you put them at a correct distance...Correct distance being the tip of the Sound-flame...Off course you also don't want to see the mic or the shadow of it in your frame so you'll have to make choices about that according to the rule you just learned...But you can also redo a lot of your sound in studio...

Now an other amazing voice-over/dubbing trick...Microphone harshness level:


Let's say you are on a budget but you want to achieve the best sounding dialog you'll do voice-over/dubbing recording but how to get the best possible results on a budget??? The most important thing to think of is:

Harshness of microphones vs softness of your voice actors:

If you have a few microphones (even very bad ones) and you have to re-dub the dialogs...the best microphone for the job might not be your most expensive one...it all depends on the Sound-Flame softness level...Even a 75$ mic can do an amazing job depending on the source.


In this situation the rule is: A "beautiful balanced" sound is made from balancing Harshness and Softness.

If your Sound-flame is harsh, smooth it with a dull microphone...Some dynamic mics ( like the Shure SM58 ) can give amazing results on a Voice-Actor who has a metallic/nasal/harsh type of voice.


On the contrary if your Sound-flame is too soft use a harsh microphone...these can be models like the RODE Nt-1000 or NT-2000 for example...or Chinese brand SE 2200A...they are pale imitations of Neumann U87 or U47 but because I own many of these mics and also the one they tried to copy i can tell you that they can become really useful according to the type of Sound-Flame I need to capture.


These are very basic rules to use your microphones in the best possible way...and even if you have more budget the same rules will apply...but in a bigger budget situation we will be able to add an amazing tool called a mic preamp which changes a lot on how your microphone reacts...to use this correctly you'll need more ear-frequency-training and skill...or a sound engineer :D

I you have questions about preamps, compressors, reverb, noise reduction,gate/thresholds, equalizations or anything else in the audio field i'll be very happy to answer,

it will be my way of contributing to this amazing website that our incredible @vitaliy_kiselev created...