Bruce Watson
Forum Replies Created
-
Those little “hits” sound to me very much like cell phone RFI. It’s a USB mic, so not using XLR cables. The RFI could be getting into your system any number of ways, but mic and/or cable are usually the most likely candidates.
-
Jay Rose’s book Producing Great Sound for Film & Video pops into mind. Covers all the bases and then some.
-
[Brian Reynolds] “So Bruce what are you feeding that requires a ‘critical’ +4?
If you are feeding a camera -10 is fine…. It actually works VERY well.”That thread isn’t mine, I just posted it for the OP to read should they want someone else’s take on it.
I basically agree with you that most applications just don’t need a full +4 dBu line level.
-
[Bob Mark] “I just found out that the Zoom F4 only has consumer line level output. That will not work for me as a mixer.”
Yep. That’s the general conclusion of this thread.
-
[Peter Derek] “I want to tune the room to cancel any tendency to echo or boom, for example if at the event a guest voice is strong. I do not of course want to make the space offer dead sound with no resonance at all.”
If I’m doing it I want to make the space as dead as possible, reducing reflections as much as possible. The laws of physics are what they are. Small rooms (and what is a portable vocal booth but a really small room?) are notorious for room modes and rapid reflections. The rapid reflections are the major factor in “small room sound”. If you have to record in a small room (including portable vocal booths) the best way to do it is to take out as much room sound as possible. Create the “space” you want in post by adding reverb.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/how-effective-are-portable-vocal-booths
The small microphone screen type devices are really only attenuating higher frequencies (1kHz and up). In the small “elevator” you describe, you’re likely to have a lot of room modes (at higher frequencies than “normal”). You can control these to some extent with bass traps, but traps are typically made for lower frequencies, say below 250Hz. You’ll want something to cover that 250-1000 Hz range as well. I’m not familiar with absorbers that work well in this range. These guys and their competitors might be able to help there:
https://www.asc-studio-acoustics.com/products/
I’m thinking somebody makes panels with available rolling stands. Roll it up against your problem wall(s), use ’em, roll them back to storage. That stuff is out there, just have to find it.
-
[Ty Ford] “Well, there are two hurdles; external noise abatement and internal acoustical properties of the booth.
Density-Isolation-Density is the only known cure for the former.”
Perhaps not. It might be possible to build a booth with active noise cancellation, similar to the active noise cancelling in Bose and Sennheiser headphones (and no doubt others as well). At least it might work for sufficiently low (long wavelength) frequencies.
That said, I’ve never seen it done. But someone has to be first, yes? Might be the OP.
-
[Richard Crowley] “We used to use Freon for this kind of cleaning before “Global Warming” became the latest phenomenon. Never mind that just the sheep in New Zealand produce an order of magnitude more greenhouse gases than all the solvent Freon used around the planet. But apparently mutton chops are more important than electrical cleaning.”
And the result of banning that freon that you so cavalierly dismiss is that the ozone hole we humans enlarged over Antarctica has shrunk back down, just as scientists predicted. And that means less UV exposure for your New Zealand sheep. It took about 30 years to heal that damage IIRC. You can look it up if you want, Goggle is your friend. This wasn’t about “green house gasses” so much as it was about freon(s) (the family of chlorofluorocarbons) explicitly.
Global warming isn’t a political point of view. The facts are the facts. The consensus among scientists supporting the theory that humans are causing an alarming amount of global warming is about the same as it is supporting the theory of gravity. That would be about 97% IIRC, for both theories.
All that said, I agree with you about the OP’s need to clean his mic. A surprisingly high percentage of electrical problems come from dirty connectors IME.
-
[Manik Möllers] “Is this a common practice or what are the downsides of it?”
No, it’s not at all common practice.
The big downside of it is that it dilutes your attention. Recording dialog well requires your full attention. Save the DAW work for post production.
As to ADR, one of the prime reasons to use ADR is to record the dialog outside of the noisy environment where the acting had to take place. Which means that recording ADR in that same environment makes little sense. And that’s why most ADR is done in an ADR studio. Also, ADR tends to be expensive, so you want to do as little of it as possible — which generally means you do your ADR after edit lock. No point in doing ADR for footage that’s not used is there?
-
[Danny Kane] “Any suggestions on a good recorder that will help to eliminate some of the background ambient noise?”
That’s not how it works. Really. While the human ear/brain audio system can in fact ignore a fair amount of background noise and let you listen to just the parts of incoming sound that you’re interested in, no audio system behaves this way. Nor can one. All the audio system can do is record what the microphone hears. Which is everything that comes its way.
The “trick” to audio is signal-to-noise ratio. And that in turn usually devolves down to microphone location relative to the sound source that’s most interesting to you. For example, if you want to hear a single person in a crowd, you need to get the mic close to that person’s mouth so that what (s)he says is loud compared to the crowd noise. This is why you see ear-set mics used in Broadway shows, putting the mic just a few cm away from the corner of the actor’s mouth. That placement is all about signal-to-noise ratio. This is nothing more, or less, than the laws of physics. You can’t break ’em, or even really bend ’em much. They just are what they are.
An alternative example is what happens when you want to record a violin soloist in a performance hall. Part of what you want when you do this is to record how the violin sounds in the hall — so you have to record some of the hall sound. That means backing up from the violin. Many experienced engineers would say that you don’t want to be any closer than a meter, and probably farther back that this, for two main reasons. One is to let the various parts of the violin “blend” into a coherent “violin sound” (your signal), and the other is so that you pick up the right amount of hall reverb (your noise). If you do it right (listen, then move your mic(s), listen again, move again, until you find the “sweet spot”) you can make amazing records — there are many records, CDs, and mp3s that illustrate this.
So will a simple “shaver” recorder miraculously eliminate some of your background noise for you? No. But proper placement of said recorder will go a long way toward reaching that goal. But you’re probably not going to get really good sound until you divest yourself of the all-in-one recorder idea so that you can place microphones where they need to be to record good sound.
And what Ty said about monitoring your audio. Every. Single. Time. Not monitoring your audio is like not watching the viewfinder of your camera. This is why everyone who does this long enough learns that audio is a full time job just like video is, and that one person can’t do a first class job of both at the same time. One will give you attention blindness for the other. Happens all the time to everyone who tries it. Not that anyone will admit it of course. That’s always something that happens to “the other guy”, right? Sure…
-
[Wesley Harrison] “The thought of the hypercardioid mic is pretty interesting. Bruce, you said the hypercardioid would work well indoors and outdoors, does that apply to live concerts where it’s pretty loud?”
How loud is “pretty loud” and where is the mic in relation to it? Most mics can handle impressively high SPL before they start distorting the signal (clipping). That Audix is listed as having a max SPL of 130 dB for example. The AT 4053b is listed as 145 dB. Both of these very high SPLs would hurt your ears (quite badly I suspect) and even a very short exposure would risk permanent hearing loss. Protect your hearing.
A rule of thumb I use (of course YMMV) is that if I’m willing to put my head there and listen, it’s probably quite safe to put a mic there so it can listen.
If the live concert is unamplified acoustic instruments, no worries. If it’s a loud electric rock band and you’re anywhere in the audience area (not on stage) it’s unlikely you have any worries, but check to be sure. When you start talking about getting close to speaker towers, guitar cabs, or a few cm from a drum head, then you need to find out just how loud your loud actually is and what the maximum the mic can handle is.
For amplified music, perhaps the best place to record the music from is front of house (FOH). That’s because the person doing the live mix is there, and (s)he’s mixing the live mix for the audience using what (s)he hears from the mixing console. See my rule of thumb above. It’s often worth asking if you can record from there. Just don’t block the line of sight for the FOH mixer.