The 7 Steps of Ideal Mic Placement — SonicScoop

Wessel Oltheten, producer, engineer and author of the book Mixing with Impact offers a roadmap to getting better sounds out of your mics, every time. For even more on this subject, look for his new in-depth series on placing mics, starting next month on SonicScoop.

Getting the ideal mic placement means making important decisions before you even move the mic. Here are 7 steps to getting better results in any context.

1. Guess—but don’t just guess.

I start by placing every microphone at the spot where I think the odds are best for it to work well.

sE Electronics DM1 Dynamite |:

The sE Electronics DM1 provides a similar functionality to many other microphone gain boosters, such as the Cloud Microphones Cloudlifter and the Triton Audio FetHead — it acts as a local in-line gain-booster for weak microphone signals, such as from passive ribbon mics and some moving-coil dynamics. It is built into a metal tube just under 100mm in length so is very compact. We were very lucky to get this review underway, actually, as this tube comes packed inside a dummy stick of dynamite, complete with fuse — Paul brought it back from the AES show in his hold luggage, and when back in the UK he found a note to say the bag had been searched by US customs; thankfully they decided his bag wasn’t suspicious enough to warrant a controlled explosion!

I have a Cloudlifter for adding clean gain to my “low output” microphones. I won it at the Potluck Audio conference a bunch of years ago. I like it. The folks I have recommended it to like it.

There are other alternatives. This is a new one at a decent price. I am a fan of sE Electronics microphones (think VooDoo VR2 active ribbon….yeah).