Over the Christmas break I picked up a matched pair of Rode M5 condenser mics, to fit in my local church auditorium, to mic up the congregation singing. Ambient mics, crowd mics, whatever you'd like to call them - I have fallen in love with the sound they can bring to a mix. We'd been using Samson C02 mics for a while now and they were doing a reasonable job, but the room/location/small diaphragm condenser style get a lot of house PA in them. I use vocal isolation to get rid of the drums and bass and other instruments but still get a lot of main vocalists reflecting into the isolated vocals so I can't go too hard with them in the mix.
My thought was to upgrade the mics and to mount them up high on the lighting rail to get them away from the musos. The mounting bracket was interesting - you can buy lighting rail brackets very cheap, but they are all metric. However it was pretty easy to source a 3/8 UNC bolt so that the bracket would do the standard microphone mount.
First recording I discovered that I liked the Rode M5 frequency response - very faithful, with a crisp sound, an improvement over the Samson C02. However, mounting them high actually increased the distance to the audience so I reckon the house PA bleed may actually be slightly worse. Argh! In hindsight, that was probably always going to happen, condenser mics do a great job of picking up everything, so unless you really have them jammed into what you are trying to mic then they are going to get everything.
Experiment 2 is going to be putting a set of shotgun mics up high and moving the M5s lower and aiming closer. The shotgun mics are pretty much condensers as well except they have clever slots on the sides to reject side sound...so they are going to pickup a lot more of what you are pointing them at. To get the "pointing at" even better, I have a green laser pointer for next time - hold it against the side of the mic so it is pointing in the same direction as the mic, and set the location based on the green dot - for the shotguns that shall be middle left/middle right, for the M5s closer to the front.
It shall be an interesting experiment - once again I'm learning by doing. I might find that the auditorium reflections are complex and the shotguns won't help that much. It might take longer and cost more to come up with a solution, perhaps getting in an expert would get a better result faster, but there is nothing like learning the hard way through experimentation to really understand something!
