How To Get A Better Sound Just By Moving Your Microphone (And 3 Effects You Get)

Don’t get wrapped up in gear. There’s one thing that can improve your sound much more than a $50,000 microphone, and it’s FREE. Knowledge will get you so much further than any piece of gear will. One of the best techniques to learn is mic placement, and it’s just about as important as the microphone you choose. Here’s some tips on getting the most out of your microphones by utilizing mic placement!

Photo by Eric Deeran on Unsplash

Tone Shaper

Depending on the distance the microphone is from the source, it will change the sound; it’s like a built-in EQ!

The closer the mic is to the source, the more bass frequencies you will capture; this is from something known as the proximity effect. The closer you get, the exponentially more bass you’ll pick up. This is very useful for vocals especially, during the more intimate parts of a song; it makes you feel closer.

The further you are away, the more mid range you get out of the sound. The lows drop because the proximity effect works in reverse, and the highs drop because they dissipate quickly.

Things change even more when you have complex sources, like singing. The closer you are to the mouth, the more of the mouth sound you’ll get, obviously. But, when you back off a little bit, you pick up more chest and throat resonances that can shape the audio to sound more natural, like you’re hearing it in person.

This is true for guitars and such as well, because of the way the instruments resonate. The sound hole is generally more bass heavy, and the neck is generally more treble weighted. Just playing with the mic position along the guitar can give dramatically different sounds, each to be tested to fit best with the song/sound you’re going for.

Reverb Adjuster

The amount of reverb you want your track to have can be adjusted by mic position too. The further away, the more the room sound comes into play; this could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what your room sounds like. If you haven’t already, check out a previous article I've written all about room resonance and room dimensions!

More often than not, it’s best to err on the safe side, that being less reverb in your track. Try to get it as dry as possible, because you can always add controlled reverb later. Chances are you aren’t recording in a state of the art facility, so getting everything as clean and dry as possible is probably the best course of action!

Wideness

If you happen to have two microphones, you can use these to create width in your track. This is called a stereo track, and you are stereo miking an instrument. There are many ways to record in stereo, each with varying degrees of width. Here’s just a few for example:

• X-Y

• ORTF

• Spaced Pair

X-Y has two mics at the same position with angles of 90 degrees (a right angle).

ORTF is just like X-Y, but a little bit wider and capsules spaced out a bit. They are angled at about 120 degrees.

Spaced pair are microphones spaced out, usually looking in the same direction. By increasing the distance between the mics, you can vary how wide the sound is.

You have to be careful with spaced pair though, because you can run into an issue with something called phase. This is when the sound waves don’t line up, and when played together in mono, it makes for a weak and thin sound. This is because the mics are at different positions and the sound is hitting the microphones at different times. With X-Y and ORTF, you don’t run into this problem because the mics are in the same position relative to each other.

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If you’d like a more in-depth article about mic position or the different ways to mic in stereo, let me know, I’d be happy to help! Hopefully this can get you started thinking about mic placement and how to record your instruments. This is what separates the novices from the pros...The pros can listen to the sound and adjust the mics to best fit the song, and the novices set them up once and forget it!

Have a good one!

-Michael