John Henshall
Can any sound gurus recommend a good microphone to capture "rich sonorous voice tones” please?
Don’t laugh, but this BBC radio interview has got me a voiceover job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9_jLUQwHnU
Chris Woolf
First question: what are you going to connect it to? Will you have a nice mixer with P48 powering? Or does it need to go straight into a PC for recording on that?
Second point: You will probably benefit from using a mic with a bit of bass tip-up to enhance the "sonorous" aspect. That means using a pressure gradient mic of some sort.
Third point: how much you want to spend. You might be able to blag one for free, buy a real cheapy for ~£40, or a beautiful Schoeps for £1500.
And a stand?
John Henshall
The recording has to be supplied as a digital file via a Mac on which I have WireTap Studio and Audacity.
I was considering connecting via the Behringer U-Phono UFO202, which I use for digitising vinyl from my Garrard 301/SME/Shure. I also have a Behringer PP400 Micro-Phono pre-amp which I use to connect the pickup to the (analogue) amplifier.
Apart from these, I have a Sony MD Walkman recorder, which I believe(?) has phantom powering.
Also have a Ferrograph Series 4 tape recorder in my store room, though I was only thinking of using this for converting the tapes I recorded before joining the BBC in 1961. I had a STC4038 from before I joined the BBC and defected to cameras but I sold this on eBay a few years ago (for a considerable sum), thinking that I had no further use for it.
I’ve seen this screen which might be a good addition at only £66:
I have found an Aiwa CM-1018 microphone in my late father’s stuff but the AA battery inside it has disintegrated and I am trying to remove the resulting verdigris. A friend has offered to loan me a Behringer XM8500 microphone to hear how that sounds. I already have a desktop stand with heavy base.
£100-£200 might be OK to spend.
John Howell
The good old STC (now Coles) 4038 takes a lot of beating, it has the characteristic of increasing bass response the closer you get, thus giving you control of the sonority (is that a word?). There are doubtless many more moderndesigns that others will suggest, but the ones to look out for are so-called ‘pressure gradient’ microphones.
Listening to you on YouTube, you certainly have a good voice for this style, so you are halfway there already!
If you are not in a pukka studio, avoid sparsely furnished rooms with no carpets they will have resonances that will enhance some of your ‘tones’ and suppress others, producing a mess.
For a demonstration of the importance of the room look no further than news reports via Skype.
John Henshall
I’ve been told about the Electrovoice RE20 and there’s one on eBay at £414. OK if I got more work but maybe that’s being a bit too hopeful?
The present requirement is for them to eMail me as required with a couple of paragraphs which I record and eMail back to them. It can be quite short notice (a day). If it works there will be more, so my best bet would be to have a modest set up at home, I think.
I think I’ll buy a Rode NT1-a, a kit of which is available on Amazon together with shock mount, pop filter and 6m XLR cable for £135 inc VAT (I’m still registered). My only question is – does it need phantom power?
Peter Leverick
Yes the Rode NT1-a does need phantom power, the local filmmaking club I run in my village has one for VO work. It’s very good and in my opinion will do exactly what you want.
Dave Plowman
Rodes used to be well thought of at the price, and they do some these days that work direct into a USB port: so-called studio types (i.e., not hand held and quite large) for about £150.
The problem is that the sort of mics we used in the studios for this sort of thing might cost £1000+ – and still need a half decent mixing desk to get the best from them.
I’ve no real experience of what’s around today. I’m just wondering how much a good working 4038 might cost today?
John Howell (Hibou)
A good one on eBay £700-£1,000+ (Jan 2017). They are popular in the USA: there is a new one up for £1,263. The manufacturer, Coles, still sell them: I think the MRP is £1,300.
Peter Neill
4038 still in daily use at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (albeit with a non-standard pop guard).
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John Howell
Cripes! They’re sitting on a gold mine!
A few weeks back I saw a tired looking 4033 on a round version of the table stand in your picture at an auction. The lot went for £340. Subsequently it appeared on eBay. It didn’t sell so the vendor listed them separately: the mic went for £360 (not unreasonable considering its condition) and the stand went for £645!
Nick Ware
In approx 1970 I bought two 4038s direct from ST&C for a price of £38 each inc purchase tax.
Not many years later, after a couple of mishaps with eager helpers, magnets and master tapes, I sold them to a friend of mine. Earlier this year I was asked to dispose of them by said friend’s soon-to-be widow to help fund a wicker coffin, and was able to send her a BACS for £800.
Personally, I wouldn’t have a use for them now as time and technology has moved on since then, but they are very definitely highly sought after by collectors of such things, usually prompted by nostalgia rather than current state-of-the-art sound quality.
In my opinion, the best value for money budget mic today for close speech or vocal use is the Rode NT1-a at around £100. But of course, you could spend £1300 quite easily!
John Henshall
Many thanks to all the audio experts for the valuable feedback. Forty years since I left the beeb and you make me still feel part of the great team.
Great idea to use a duvet on a clothes horse as a sound baffle!
I’m going to go for the Rode NT1-A as it is a reasonable price and seems it would do the job. (I now see it does require 48v phantom power, but these are only £15.)
I don’t know how long this ‘job’ is going to last but I want to give it a good try if I can do it from home. Who knows, it might lead to more. Years ago when I was shooting K-Tel commercials with Bob Coles, the producer asked me to do some voiceovers but I declined. I was scared as I was not (am not) an Equity member but I’ve always regretted it and it doesn’t matter now. Mind you, I did end up also shooting the stills for the album covers using my Hasselblad (matching square format) so I was happy.
Nick Ware
To go with your Rode NT1-a I would then recommend you get a Focusrite Scarlett Solo (2nd Gen) interface unit which will connect to your Mac (or any computer) via USB and provide phantom power to the mic as well as itself off the Computer’s USB bus.
Search for "Scarlett Solo" on the internet: price around £78.
My no.1 son is a tech support / product design engineer at Focusrite, but the Scarlett is so intuitive and straightforward you won’t need him!
Then of course, having got your mic, interface and Mac up und running, you will need to find the quietest and non reverberant place to record in.
I think you might find your recorded WAV files too big to send as email attachments, and should persuade your client to use Dropbox for sending/receiving. WAV is better quality than mp3 but has bigger file sizes, being uncompressed. (audio equiv. of RAW versus compressed mp4, jpg, etc).
Graeme Wall
An alternative to Dropbox for the occasional transfer is “weTransfer” https://wetransfer.com I’ve used it to send batches of photos abroad.
Barry Bonner
I use an Omnitronic LH-045 pre amp/phantom power supply for my C451 mic when I’m dubbing. It’s brilliant: not only gives you phantom power but gain as well – also there’s a useful headphone output.
Nick Ware
There’s no EQ in the Scarlett, but there must be, and better EQ, in the edit software? The Scarlett generates the 48V from the 5V USB supply, but bear in mind the mic only needs a very few milliAmps so that’s no big deal. Ditto, the Scarlett for its mic amp, which probably has +/- 15V supply rails. The standard USB spec is 5Volts at up to 500milliAmps.
Listening to John’s voice on YouTube, I think I would try not to use any EQ, and definitely don’t roll off much, if any, LF, or you will lose some of what’s best about it.
John mentioned earlier that he has Audacity on his Mac, plus some other prog that I’m not familiar with as I’m not a Mac user. Equalisation, compression, limiting, etc., is best done in software, rather than hardware, these days. Most edit software has all that, and much, much more. Another possible edit program would be Reaper (I’m sure there must be a Mac version), but there are many, ranging in price from freeware up to the obscenely expensive.
What John needs is not just a mic amp, but a mic amp that is also an in/out (plus headphone monitor) computer interface. The Scarlett is in all those respects, sheer magic; doesn’t require any setup or drivers; just appears as a source in your edit prog. It’s also the easiest way to copy all your analogue tapes and vinyls to digital. The Scarlett Solo isn’t by any means the only one, I just recommend it because I use the 2i2 version of it myself.
If you search "Scarlett" on the internet, try not to be distracted by Scarlett Moffatt!
Chris Woolf
While I won’t disagree with other people’s suggestions, there’s another route that you might prefer.
Rather than use the older analogue gear, you could just buy a USB mic and go straight into the Mac. This removes many of the problems of hums and buzzes that often plague ad hoc set-ups, and of trying to persuade old gear to get its act together again.
Have a search on Thomann’s (www.thomann.de) site for USB mics, and pick any cardioid (or super or hyper-cardioid) from a price range that suits. Thomann are an Amazon-like music industry supplier, German and export to the UK very efficiently. They are by far the best audio supplier for this sort of thing – you get a better range, better price, better support and faster delivery than anything the UK can provide.
The actual mic you choose isn’t desperately important – you are working close to it (probably about 6-12" to get a nice bass tip) and just want a nice sound from it: signal-to-noise and exact faithfulness of reproduction won’t be particularly important in such a case. Pick one with a stand and a pop filter, then just plug into the Mac and record.
John Henshall
The Thomann website is very interesting. Might buy a cheap-ish USB mike to compare.
However, the first thing which caught my eye on the website was a body pack transmitter at €77. When I had an event at the BFI/NFT three years ago, I recorded video inserts by Nana Mouskouri and Miriam Margolyes using a cheapo clip-on Sony radio mike I’ve had for years. The quality was, er, shall we say just about acceptable. There was quite a lot of interference, requiring multiple takes. I’m probably going to Nepal in a couple of months, with a young person’s charity, and thought I’d shoot a story there.
Nine years ago, when there was a big earthquake in the Sichuan province of China, I was already booked to go to Chengdu and friends suggested they contribute money and I took gifts for some of the schoolchildren whose homes had been destroyed. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life – the scale of destruction and suffering and the way the Chinese were dealing with it so stoically. The BBC used my video when I returned and, at the transfer at BBC Oxford, there were about a dozen people in the control room marvelling at the quality from my little Sony HD camcorder. So small it got past the security checks in China – they believed me that I wasn’t a journalist. Well I wasn’t – at that stage I was only shooting it for myself.
So when I’ve set up my mini voice-over studio I might also look at the Thomann website for … a personal radio mike to use in Nepal.
I might’ve been on sound, except for an incident in TC2 in 1961. John Fane (where is he now?) was my ‘trained operator’. I was operating the boom on rehearsal but then they decided to go for a take. John climbed up the front of the MR boom while I climbed down the rear. The result was that the whole boom fell over. John EdenEadonEdon was not well impressed. And that’s how I ended up on cameras.
I have put a Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer (£48.50) into my internet purchase basket. The 502 seemed OK until I found it does not have phantom power. I can change to the Focusrite Scarlett Solo (2nd Gen) (£76) which certainly looks good and simple to use but does it have equalisation, as the 802 does, and is that necessary/desirable? The Scarlett certainly seems what’s needed apart from the luxury of EQ and it doesn’t need mains power. Does it up the USB voltage to 48v?
I also put a Tiger MCA7-BK Boom Microphone Stand with Free Clip – Black (£19.49) in my internet purchase basket.
I said I’d send the files by eMail when I meant by t’Internet – i.e. Dropbox.
I’ve got a room which I think is suitable acoustically but I was going to add the suggested duvet on a clothes horse!
I feel as though I’ve been on an Evesham course! Great stuff thank you all – and I hope these messages aren’t annoying to others – especially fellow cameramen …
Alasdair Lawrance
Certainly not annoying to me. I might start telling everyone about the presentation rig I’m putting together for meetings I organise of the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal Society, if you’re not careful!
I was looking for a decent ‘gallows arm’ mic stand anyway.
Nick Ware
I did actually wonder about suggesting a USB mic, but thought that might be going a bit too non-pro to recommend. Do I need to revise my views on that?
The thing about the Rode is that it can be used for other non-USB purposes, and the Scarlett can be used for other interfacing than just a microphone. All of which may or may not be important, of course.
Chris Woolf
The capsules used in the USB interface mics are usually the same (electret) ones used in the cheaper ranges of analogue interfaced mics. The electronics simply include a standard USB client chip. Pro and non-pro descriptors mean less and less nowadays, and mainly hint at how strongly made a device is. For an application such as John’s, the accuracy of response and the noise performance are almost certainly perfectly adequate – it isn’t like trying to squeeze something brilliant out of a violin quartet. Voice-over applications are pretty undemanding, with the avoidance of breath pops and rattling false teeth being a bigger challenge than anything else.
If something perfectly good for the voice-over can be got for £50 then the extra price may not be worthwhile. There’s the added benefit of avoiding pretty well any risk of hums and buzzes, which many cheaper analogue set-ups are prone to.
John Howell
For the proposed setup I wouldn’t think John needed EQ: as I suggested earlier, a performer can control the bass frequencies to a degree by their distance from the mic. However if you get seriously into VO work you may need to roll off quite a bit of bass and lift the presence (upper mid-frequencies c 3KHz) if you are doing a ‘hard-sell’ punchier delivery.
Which brings me to Compressor/Limiters. If you are doing more ‘aggressive’ pieces you may want to consider at least a limiter. I have been out of the game for 17 years now so cannot advise on current thinking, I leave it to those actively involved to make suggestions.
Dave Plowman
John Henshaw’s questions got be thinking.
Looking at older TV progs, a vocal mic was pretty small and neat looking. Older ones would have been a dynamic M100 or MD211. Then came the ubiquitous C451 and perhaps KM87.
These days they are massive devices, even where high foldback and or PA revels are not involved. Are they really a better performer?
(Obviously, a radio hand mic will be larger than a cabled one. But I’m talking about cabled types.)
Mike Jordan
I do quite a lot of work with a neighbour for Pantomime/school shows and we use lots of personal radio mics.
Apart from the fact that we have mini-xlr to 3.5mm jack adaptors on the Sennheisers so that kids changing/playing with headsets on shared transmitters don’t wiggle/unscrew the jacks and bend contacts inside the units that I then have to disassemble and bend back, I spend many hours making/mending these short adaptor cables (at least better than when my neighbour used phonos which fall out too easily and require ALL new mic purchases to be re-ended).
The older personals came with alligator type clips where the wire fitted snugly in the clip so held the capsule firm.
New ones (cheaper?) have plastic clips where the cable “clamp” (which is just a groove in the clip) have the problem that the clip slot is so big that it doesn’t hold the cable so when dancing/jumping around, the capsule/cable slips down into the clamp and bounces up and down in the clamp with a huge bang on the mic.
Is it just the duff new design of clamp? Obviously not a problem on a static interview but dreadful on dancing.
I tried a bit of gaffer tape to grip better but it didn’t really work and my neighbour was very disapproving.
Is it just our kit or is this a general problem?
I don’t know what to suggest.
Pat Heigham
I’ve never had a problem with Trams, or Sony’s or COS-11’s – never used Sennheisers.
What you could try, if you are re-ending anyway, is to use a short piece of heat-shrink sleeving on the cable, where the clip needs to fit. Put on before fitting plug! Be careful with applying heat, though!
I had a problem with Lemo plugs and Canare cable which had a soft outer jacket. When tightening the cable clamp, it affected the free sliding of the latching collar. The guys at the Lemo distributors suggested the heatshrink sleeve technique, which solved it.
I’m not sure if one can get black heat shrink, most of the RadioSpares (RS Components) stock is yellow. Or maybe the smallest Hellerman sleeve, to bulk out the cable. They are available in black. You might need some of their lubricant to slide the sleeve on.
Another installation way is to use doublesided tape, wrapped around the capsule and stuck into the costume, but that buggers a quick change routine if you need that.
Nick Ware
You can get heatshrink sleeve in all ten resistor-colour-code colours and most sizes from:
www.heatshrink-online.co.uk/heatshrink/
then scroll down to "Coloured heatshrink".
Tell us what the mic is or tell us its diameter and I’m sure we can find a better clip for it at Canford or CPC. Sony clips, for example are available as spare parts. Rycote sell a range of excellent and essential accessories ("Stickies") for fitting mics on or under clothing, designed for them by the one and only Chris Woolf – him the expert!
Whilst at Canford and CPC you can probably find better quality lapel mics with metal clips that your neighbour might find it worth investing in. There are some that are surprisingly good and surprisingly cheap. Or think about using over-the-ear cheek mics, maybe:
www.cpc.farnell.com/performance-headset-microphones/
I agree, most of the plastic personal mic clips are awful, as are the ones that grip the wire, not the mic. But there’s lots out there…
Mike Jordan
Not just me then!
Maplin do heatshrink (I use it for doing the 2.5mm jacks fairly well. I will experiment more.
We used to use the “Britney” headsets but the kids are always damaging the wires at the back or bending the supports all the time or putting mics right on skin so they rustle and losing the windshields, so we mainly use personal mics now.
Pat Heigham
I filmed an amateur production in a Devon village hall for a friend.
A really great talented cast, but one child singer had been given a cheek mic which unfortunately was not balanced correctly on the PA system, and sounded awful. This happens when you get non-professionals monkeying about. I was in no position to interfere.
PA support should be mildly enhanced, instead of blasting out.
My solution would be to have no personal mics at all, and train the kids to project! Hit the back of the hall!
For the recording mentioned above, I used a couple of mics in the footlights, for stereo off the stage.
I remember a visit to Aston University while at Wood Norton to see a demo of the Eidophor projector. The sound was being handled by Birmingham OB’s and was brilliant. The voice enhancement from the lectern was imaged dead centre, and not really obvious that it was miked.
Mike Giles
I’m afraid that having chided and cajoled children, particularly juniors, and their teachers, to get them to project, it really is impossible for some kids, but it is still important for them to experience ‘stage’ performance which may improve the very confidence that they lack ~ I’m sure we all know the feeling in the pit of the stomach which then proceeds to swallow your voice! And even at senior school, lots of good performers just can’t compete with the accompanying school orchestra.
