Rank Newbie Needs Help

[Johnhardy1]

Thanks in advance!

Where I stand: I already have a Zoom H5 studio. The main reason I bought it was to record myself and my wife playing acoustic guitar and mandolin and singing. The 2nd reason was to record live shows which Ive done twice now. I've been basically satisfied with the quality though both recordings suffer a bit in spots with a small amount of clipping and wind noise. Both issues i think I'll be able to solve with lower gain levels and a windscreen. Both shows were moderately loud (jamband & jamgrass stuff).
My main issue is too much crowd noise. I was able to output decent files in audacity but still too much crowd noise.

So my newbie brain tells me ...new mics and a new, taller mic stand. From what I've been able to gather from here and google searches I should be looking at supercardoid or hypercardoid mics. I can see how this could get expensive!
Do you think it's possible that $500 - $600 can get me what I need? ....2 mics, stereo bar, mic stand, cables etc? Is that realistic?

Whatever suggestions or newbie info I can get from y'all will be greatly appreciated.

John

[kliked]

You didn't mention the environment you are recording in, but I'm guessing Super/Hyper cards probably aren't the answer.  Where those do well is recording from a good distance inside arenas. Because they are so directional, they reject a lot of reverberant noise, which probably isn't your problem.

Getting above the crowd will help, and windscreens are a must outside, but if you have a chatty crowd, there is only so much you can do. If you want to invest in mics, just buy a good pair of cardioids. A long time ago a friend told me "90% of the time cards are the right choice and they are never the wrong choice." You can get a pair of Line Audio CM4s for around $600, and if you are patient and watch the yard sale, you can find other good deals.

[Melanie]

Tall lighting stand is a must if recording in open situations very much, hat trick for all else.

[jefflester]

You can get a pair of Line Audio CM4s for around $600

A lot less than that.
https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=209773
I bought 4 from Jam a couple of months ago for $450 shipped.

[kliked]

Yes, I should have clarified; You can get CM4s with cables and whatnot for around $600.

[Johnhardy1]

Yeah, I didn't really talk about the application etc. The next thing I "need" to record is band playing on the covered rear porch of a home which is fairly low. There'll be 2 speaker cabinets off an integrated PA deal. They probably both stand 7-8' high. I will probably set up in front of a fairly large tree which is somewhere around 35-40' ft from the stage and on the right side nearly in line of the right side speaker cabinet. The lowest tree branch is probably 20' or so, so there shouldn't be a problem getting high enough. There'll be a few rows of folks in between.

Other venues. The main places are normal size indoor clubs with slightly elevated stages that are around 30-35' wide? Other than that I can definitely see a few outdoor festivals in my future and possibly an arena show or 2. A few bands I like allow it.

[Johnhardy1]

You can get a pair of Line Audio CM4s for around $600

A lot less than that.
https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=209773
I bought 4 from Jam a couple of months ago for $450 shipped.

It looks like jam.se has 8 in stock. Price is great. How long did shipping take? Were there fast options? 2 for around $225 shipped seems great. Do they really perform better than mics costing double their price? Are there any comparisons? Thanks.

[goodcooker]

I'm a big fan of the Sennheiser e614 hypercardioid mics. You can get them brand new for $200 each from any of the big online retailers or less on the used market. I got a pair for $60 each from eBay a while back. It's possible they are counterfeits (since Shure and Sennheiser seem to be the most counterfeited brands right now) but if they are, they are just as good as the original pair I had a few years ago. Click the LMA bookmark link in my signature to listen to some examples with various gear downstream from them. Here's one from Saturday straight into the preamps built into the Tascam DR100mkii - https://archive.org/details/kcb2026-06-27/kcbones2026-06-27set1t03.flac

As stated - cardioids are almost always a good choice whether indoors, outdoors, on stage, back of the room, etc. There's plenty of good choices of budget cardioid small diaphragm condensers - sE7, AKG makes a new one now the C151 that I haven't heard yet. The mentioned Line Audio CM4 (or discontinued CM3 which is a little more like an open or wide cardioid pattern), Lewitt LCT 040, used AKG 391, used Peluso CEMC6, - all these fit in your budget.

When comparing spec sheets for the mics you are interested in look for
- high SPL handling (>120dB),
- low self noise (<21dB or so, most mics are in this range nowadays. If you are recording very quiet sources you may want mics with a great self noise measurement. If you are recording loud stuff this is not as important - I wouldn't let a mic with a self noise figure of 21dB deter me)
- sensitivity that matches what you are trying to accomplish (here's a guide to figuring out what sensitivity rating matches your use case and downstream gear - https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/support/week-microphones-sensitivity-important-know)

[mrfender]

I'm a big fan of the Sennheiser e614 hypercardioid mics. You can get them brand new for $200 each from any of the big online retailers or less on the used market. I got a pair for $60 each from eBay a while back. It's possible they are counterfeits (since Shure and Sennheiser seem to be the most counterfeited brands right now) but if they are, they are just as good as the original pair I had a few years ago. Click the LMA bookmark link in my signature to listen to some examples with various gear downstream from them. Here's one from Saturday straight into the preamps built into the Tascam DR100mkii - https://archive.org/details/kcb2026-06-27/kcbones2026-06-27set1t03.flac

I also bought a pair of these mics off Ebay but haven't gotten a chance to run them yet (hopefully 2 weeks).  Dimension wise they match the published numbers on the Sennheiser website, just a little shy of the weight by a couple of grams.  The one "off" thing is that they only have "e614" on the body (script type matches published pictures), they are missing the word "Sennheiser" like most pictures of real ones have.  

[Gutbucket]

The top strategies for dealing with unwanted crowd noise are: get high, get closer.  Farther from the unwanted noises, closer to the wanted ones.  Secondly there is the quality of the crowd noise itself, which tends to be more musically connected and engaged up front, while the chatter is pretty much always more distracted and disconnected farter back aggravated by the music not being as loud back there.

Anytime recording a PA, but especially when running up high, make sure the mics remain inside the direct radiation pattern of the high frequency horns in the PA speakers.  The mics should ideally have a clear and direct "line of sight" into the horns.  I walk over to the side to and view both PA and recording stand and sort of mentally project the horn profile angles out into the space to confirm the mics aren't positioned above that line.  With smaller PA speakers you can often easily see the exposed horn of and visually look into it to see the throat. Be aware that small single speaker PA cabinets and older point-source PA cabinets tend to have a significantly wider vertical radiation pattern than modern stacked line-array PAs.  That means you can safely go higher than a small PA as long as the mics remain within the projected radiation "cone" of the high frequency horns.  That sounds like the situation you describe with the small PA speakers located 8' up on the porch and the recording stand 40' back in front of the tree up significantly higher.  Same goes for horizontal placement, ideally the mics should to be able to "see" all the way into the throat of the horns, which is why the PA sound can become less clear in the front few rows near the middle if there are no front fill speakers to compensate.

In contrast, the vertically stacked mid/high-frequency modular cabinets of a line-array PA tend to radiate widely in the horizontal plane, but have a very sharp cut off in the vertical plane.  That keeps the vertical array of cabinets from interfering too much with each other and improves projection out into the audience, but means clarity tends to drop off rapidly above the uppermost cabinet of the line array.  When recording that type of PA I make sure to hoist the mics no higher than the PA itself.

[al w.]

in addition to the excellent advice above... re: crowd noise -- don't be afraid to run wide AB with your cards. I've had massive improvements with crowd noise running my hypers AB spaced 30cm

sure there are tradeoffs with regard to stereo image and such, but it's worth it to me

just my two cents!

[robgronotte]

Yeah, I didn't really talk about the application etc. The next thing I "need" to record is band playing on the covered rear porch of a home which is fairly low. There'll be 2 speaker cabinets off an integrated PA deal. They probably both stand 7-8' high. I will probably set up in front of a fairly large tree which is somewhere around 35-40' ft from the stage and on the right side nearly in line of the right side speaker cabinet. The lowest tree branch is probably 20' or so, so there shouldn't be a problem getting high enough. There'll be a few rows of folks in between.

Other venues. The main places are normal size indoor clubs with slightly elevated stages that are around 30-35' wide? Other than that I can definitely see a few outdoor festivals in my future and possibly an arena show or 2. A few bands I like allow it.

Why so far away? The best (and cheapest) way to improve your recordings is to get the mics closer to the sound source. The farther away they are, the murkier the sound will be and the more annoying audience noise that will be on your recording. 

[Gutbucket]

in addition to the excellent advice above... re: crowd noise -- don't be afraid to run wide AB with your cards. I've had massive improvements with crowd noise running my hypers AB spaced 30cm

sure there are tradeoffs with regard to stereo image and such, but it's worth it to me

just my two cents!

^ +T

Yeah, except now we're getting into sophisticated management of crow noise in the "rank newbie" thread. Wider microphone spacing doesn't reduce the level of the noise, but helps portray in a way that begins to separate some of it from the music, making it less distracting and annoying even though its no quieter on the recording.  Do the other things if possible (get closer and/or higher) as they are more fundamental in increasing the ratio of music to noise, but using a stereo microphone configuration that has a wider spacing can help perceptually.

It does so by causing the randomly distributed chatter to be more spread out across the playback image, with more of it pushed out toward the sides of the playback image, leaving more room for the music in the middle, which helps your ear/brain more easily separate those things.

Because omnis tend to be spaced more widely, the phenomena is especially noticeable when using them. Couple reasons for that. One is that a little bit of the proverbial "hole in the middle problem" with wide-spaced-omni actually becomes advantageous.  "Hole in the middle" is a bit of a misnomer.  It's more like a "thinning out" of image placement to either side of center.  Specific sources tend to image either near the center or farther over to one side or the other, and somewhat less so between those three positions.  The way in which it helps with portrayal of audience noise is that the music remains centered since the microphone pair is oriented perpendicular to the stage and PA.  Because the path-length from those sources to both microphones is the same, that content is fully "in phase" across both channels. In contrast to that, randomly distributed audience noise sources will be picked up with varying phase offsets, causing them to be more widely distributed across the playback image, and due to the wide spacing, a lot of that will have a significant phase offset between channels causing it to image well off to the sides.  The diffuse reverberant content (that is the non-specific, non-discrete audience noise that's not phase-correlated at all) doesn't image discretely or follow the hole in the middle thing but is portrayed diffusely and evenly across the entire playback stage, sort of gluing it all together.

Some more advanced arrays place a third microphone, stereo pair or whatever in the center between the two omnis, taking further advantage of the "hole in the middle" phenomena, and allowing the omnis to be spaced a bit wider still.

Is noticeable with omnis spaced 3', which is generally safe for two channels.  Its really noticeable at about twice that spacing, but you then need to be careful about the situation unless running additional mics in the center. Times when I've been recording from an audience position but not able to hoist high, using an array that includes omnis spaced about 5' along with other mics in the center, I've been amazed how now very close audience (which is still gonna be loud regardless simply due to proximity) are mostly heard only over in one channel or the other, unless they are positioned pretty much directly in front or behind.

Apologies to OP John for going a bit overly far into the weeds on this. I'd advise you not to worry about this stuff for now! Keep your focus on the big picture, begin making recordings, and refine technique over time.  Just know we're here to discuss this kind of arcane stuff as you move forward.