how they stop the mic from picking up noise of being put back onto the mic stand at live shows?
In: Engineering
They turn off the mic before putting it down. There are lots of sound guys watching the performer and controlling the microphones, or the performer can do it themselves.
depends on your set up and what equipment you have, there are a couple ways to do it.
Firstly, if it doesn’t matter to your singers, you simply use mics that are VERY directional. There are microphones that will only pick up what is spoken or sang directly into the front of them. Turn it just slightly to the side and it won’t pick up your voice at all. With this, you don’t need to worry about other sounds.
But, some musicians don’t like them bcuz they’re more restrictive in terms of moving around and where you have to hold the mic. So they’ll use less directional mics. That means they either need to pay more attention to where the speakers are set up to prevent feed back. Or, we live in a modern era, we have sound systems that can use a computer to filter out the sound it knows it just released out the speakers
The stage and all the speakers are carefully constructed to give different sounds on stage (called monitor sound) and into the stands. You have one set of speakers pointing outwards, these are hard to hear from behind them on stage. The venue is constructed to trap the sound so it does not get reflected back to the stage performers.
There are other speakers pointed towards the performers, usually on the floor at the edge of the stage allowing performers to put their foot on them to look cool. When you are on stage these are the ones you hear and they have the volume turned down and might not have the same reverb effects and such. The audio engineer can also turn down the volume of the microphones in the monitors if feedback is an issue. It has also become more and more common for performers to wear monitor ear buds so the monitor speakers can be turned off completely.
In addition to this the audio engineer can catch the feedback and adjust the volume before it is an issue. You might just start to hear the feedback and then it dies down as the audio engineer fixes the issue. They have lights showing the volume of each channel so any feedback will show up as a big red bar on their mixer. The audio engineer also knows the songs and what the performers will do so they will turn off microphones that are not used. This way a particularly loud guitar solo will not be picked up by an idle microphone on stage as the audio engineer have muted this mike and only unmutes it when the vocalist steps up to it. This is also why a lot of vocalists will enter the stage holding a microphone high up in the air, the sound engineer can read the tape color so he knows which microphone to unmute. Although this have turned into a show bit as well, same as standing on the monitor speakers to hear them better have become a classical show move.
Former concert sound guy here! Before the show, the sound folks will work with the performers to configure all of the processing and mixing—sending different audio to different speakers, adjusting the amplification on microphones, etc. Typically, the audio processing on a vocal line will include software (called filtering) to eliminate sharp peaks in the feed (like bumps). Modern sound boards can pretty well filter out everything coming from a microphone that isn’t made by a human voice.
“it depends”, but generally we don’t fully 100% eliminate the sound. we just do a lot of things that all play a roll in minimizing it. most of these things have other more important reasons, they just ALSO help with that noise.
high pass filters eliminate a lot of the low thud. this alone can be the difference between what you’re used to at your bands practice space, and what you hear on a modern pro level mix.
different microphones have different amount of handling noise. the most common mic at the middle levels (still an sm58) has a pretty terrible amount of handling noise. plenty of top tier pop acts are leaning towards different capsules these days, and lots of them have lower handling noise than what you may be used to at your local club/bar.
expanders. specifically ones key’d to vocal frequencies. super simplified, this makes the sound of someone singing/speaking into a mic the focus, and turns down extraneous noises also being picked up by the microphone.( PSE, 5045, cedar, WNS – if you want something to google)
mic clips. the thing on the top of a stand that actually holds the mic and makes that sound? they are not all made the same. the “standard” style mic clip is great for a mic that doesn’t need to be removed mid show. think a drum kit, or singer that also plays guitar and won’t be moving their mic. these are often made of hard plastic with a tiny bit of give. if i have a vocalist i know will be removing the mic frequently it will end up in a slightly larger mic clip, with rubber cushioning on the bottom. these are the standard clip provided with a wireless mic (one would expect a wireless mic to be walked around the stage more often) but they also function just fine with wired mics, and are my preferred choice when a lead vocalist wants a wired mic, but will also be moving it around a lot.
So many weird answers here. The simple answer is the audio engineer has a button that turns the microphone on and off, and they are watching the performer closely for these situations. Typically, any microphone that is not currently being used is either turned off or down, because each microphone that is on and turned up is increasing the potential for feedback or other unwanted noises.
1. The mic has a pickup pattern that is only right in front of it about a fist away from the mic that helps cut down on background noise
2. There are little tricks and hardware like the artist being careful with the mic and having padding on the stand and stuff like that
3. They put “filters” on it. Human voice ranges from about 300-3000Hz so you can get rid of stuff outside of that. Any decently sized artist will also have people that can narrow it down further and basically know what ranges they will sing in. This prevents any super high pitched ringing or low pitched thumping. It doesn’t take the sound all the way out usually but it will dampen it a lot
4. They use ai. If you even use discord to talk you might have noticed this but ai can very easily take out any unexpected and very loud sound. It’ll see a giant spike and try and do a good job of taking that sound out but keeping the voice as in tact as possible. It’s more complicated than that but that’s the basic idea
5. There’s someone working on the sound board that can react to some things. If you ever see a fan on stage you might notice for their first syllable or two they peak the mic. A compressor will catch some of this right away but it might distort the sound so the techs will turn it down and adjust. If the person is about to put the mic away and not use it again for a sec they can just turn it down. There’s a lot more tools they have than just turning it up and down but that’s the basics
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