A few years ago I worked with a cool traditional bluegrass band that wanted the look of a single mic typical of performances in that genre, but they weren’t getting the desired sonic result.
The solution was attaching lavs to the mandolin, upright bass, and the shirts of the guitar and fiddle players. They attained a much better sound, maintained the “single mic” look, and as a bonus I had more control of the mix.
With older vintage mics that look great but aren’t sonically usable anymore, I remove the components and mount rubber suspension for attaching lavs inside. It works surprisingly well, and provides the ability to swap in different pickup patterns.
In fact, I’ve rented some of these mics for movie production, and the dialog captured during the filming is used in the final product, not replaced by additional dialog recording (ADR) in post-production.
Lavs also make great back-up mics. One of my favorite tricks is to tape a lav just below the head of a podium mic, making sure we’re still going to receive audio even if the primary mic fails. Plus, it’s a more attractive solution than deploying two podium mics.
Sometimes I use a lav with a wider pickup pattern for added flexibility, depending on who’s at the podium. It can also be used as the recording feed mic.
Another approach is attaching lavs as back-ups on singers. One “diva” I worked with a while back had horrible mic technique, and she wasn’t about to change. (Thus the diva reference.)
However, I was able to talk her into also wearing a lav, so I could utilize the two sources together to get a more consistent signal. Not perfect, but way better than what we started with. I’ve also placed lavs on singers and used them just for recording in case there’s a glitch with the main handheld wireless.
A colleague owns a studio and sometimes tapes a lav onto the booth window, using it as a recording boundary mic. I’ve heard the results and it works well for certain sessions.
Recently my company handled production for a meeting here in Las Vegas and one of the participants was stuck at his office back East because of snow. As a result, he needed to call in for his portion of the presentation, and while the hotel property had a conference unit, it didn’t have an audio output that could be used with the PA. So I placed a lav on the unit’s built-in loudspeaker, applied some EQ, and it ended up sounding a whole lot better than a lousy phone line while also being invisible.
There’s a lot of great technology when it comes to modern miniature mics, so don’t hesitate to “think small” the next you’ve got a problem to solve.
Senior contributing editor Craig Leerman is the owner of Tech Works, a production company based in Las Vegas.