Picture of the Week: How Not to Use a Shotgun Mic

[Jey (Jey Jeyendran)]

This was a really great Youtube vid but my podcasting Spidey Senses kicked into overdrive every time time I glanced at his mic setup.

That mic could easily be out of camera shot. Which would make the pop filter redundant. And his sound wasn’t great either.

Such a shame as he’s invested a lot of cash in this set up.

If you’re not familiar with shotguns - then the usual setup is to boom the mic about 30cm or 1 foot away from the speaker and aim the mic at the speaker’s chest area (to avoid plosives). Looks like he’s got the shotgun plumbed into a recorder - I’m guessing a Tascam with 32bit float and wide dynamic range which means it will compensate for bad mic placement, but still…sigh.

Sorry, I just needed to rant with folks who might understand.

[craigconstantine]

AND I’ve never seen a handheld recorded mounted on an arm like that either.

My Zoom H6 does have a threaded mount socket, like the Tascam in the photo. But the mount option is for on top of a camera, where you stand behind the camera so you can still work the controls on the handheld. Even when I put my handheld into interface mode, I still use some of the controls (level setting, but that wouldn’t be a thing on a 32-bit)…

It’s just… odd. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[craigconstantine]

A classic error though, is to talk to the end of a side-address microphone. The mic in this picture, one should be facing the gain knob…

I admit, this stuff is actually not at all obvious…