MC208
30 March 2018
Filming guitar instructional videos. Currently have a RODE NTG-1 mic positioned above and in front of the teacher. Problem is that the mic not only picks up the teacher's voice, but also the sound coming out of the monitor speakers, as well as that annoying pick snapping against the strings sound that makes the guitar sound thin and tinny on the video. Someone said I need to use a head/ear set mic to avoid this. What type should I be looking for so that the mic only picks up the voice and nothing else, or as little as possible of anything else?
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I've had really good results in this situation using a carefully
I've had really good results in this situation using a carefully-positioned M-S array of ribbon mics, but taking the channels separately rather than decoding them. I started by using my Beyer M160/M130 pair, but have more recently favoured an AT4081 for the S-mic rather than the M130. Ribbons have a greater directional control that tends to be maintained over their full frequency range compared with condensers. This gives a real advantage when it comes to the problem of pick-click bleed.
There are two operational things to get right: array positioning and room acoustic. For the positioning, I mount the mics as a standard M-S pair on a mic bar, then turn it 90 degrees so the S-mic is horizontal. I position the rotated pair so it is roughly at the apex of a right-angled triangle in front of the performer with the singer's mouth and the guitar fretboard at the other two corners of the triangle. That placement results in the hypercardioid M160 pointing up by 45 degrees at the mouth and the fig-8 AT4081 45 degrees down towards the guitar, with the mouth in its null. As an aside, the null in the AT4081 is about the best fig-8 null I have come across in this price range. It also has a definite colour in its sound that suits quality steel-string guitars really well.
Getting the room acoustic right is more tricky, as performers generally do not like playing in the sort of acoustic that gives the best results in terms of bleed between the microphones. Using in-ear foldback with reverb added is usually necessary. The acoustic setup is something that is very venue/studio dependent, but I have found main thing to tame is floor reflections.
I have got weary of arguing with engineers who insist on using a condenser mic as the M and a ribbon as the S in an M-S array, as showing them phase diagrams to demonstrate that a simple sum-difference M-S decode does not work gets me labelled as a crank. However, in the vocal/guitar array I described above, there is no decoding, so you could use a condenser as the M (vocal) mic if you preferred that sound over that of a ribbon. Note that it would likely be at the expense of HF bleed from the guitar.