Cheapo room ambience mics..

[tuf]

This has been covered many times here in the form of drum overhead mics, but I am on the lookout for mic suggestions that would be appropriate for capturing room ambience during a headphone recording session.

I am not looking for musical use per-se, but more to just capture the conversation, etc amongst the musicians in the room. I usually record a band live, monitoring through headphones with no live room monitors (townhome basement, keep the neighbor happy). Since these are casual jams designed for culling ideas, printing the chatter is important as they often discuss whatever it was they just did.

Mics stuck in front of each person is not the most natural way to catch casual conversation, so I'm looking for something like overheads to do the job. I am considering very low cost condensors and also stuff like the PZMs.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[midigod]

Behrigner ECM8000s are great for this, and they're omnis. And incredibly cheap. Just remember that if you have drums or any actual instruments in the room, you'll need to limit the crap out of them in order to hear the talking effectively between takes. Since it's just spoken word, that can normally be done during tracking.

[tuf]

Originally Posted by midigod

Behrigner ECM8000s are great for this, and they're omnis. And incredibly cheap. Just remember that if you have drums or any actual instruments in the room, you'll need to limit the crap out of them in order to hear the talking effectively between takes. Since it's just spoken word, that can normally be done during tracking.

Thx for the suggestion, I'll check them out. All the guitars are DI'd and the rest is synths and V-Drums. Nothing loud to speak of.

If anyone has any opinions on using PZMs for this I'd love to hear it, as they would be a little cheaper to implement (no booms/stands).

[tINY]

See if you can get some Radio Shack PZMs (one would probably do, two would be a little better). Tape them to the ceiling at opposite corners of the band (or one in teh center).



-tINY

[dasbin]

I don't think ECM8000's are the best option for this at all, due to their very poor SNR. Once you give them enough gain to pickup conversation from more than a foor or two away, the noise is going to be pretty extreme.

PZM's are commonly used as "program sound" in theatres (so performers backstage can hear what's happening onstage). The theatre I work at has one hanging in front of the stage up the in the catwalks. It's on a 3sq. ft sheet metal plate and sounds fine. Plenty of gain with no noise.
If you go this route you should only need one, up in a corner somewhere. You can fashion some sort of plate, or if you already have a suitable surface somewhere in the room then use that (I'm not sure if painted drywall makes a good boundary).

[midigod]

I'll go ahead and reiterate my choice of the Behringers, as I haven't found them to be noisy at all. In fact, I've used them on more than one occasion as ambience mics in a very large room, and had very good results. The ambience in that case was easily as quiet as I would expect to find for mid-distance speech in a small room.

As Fletcher would say, YMMV.

-Craig

[Jamstudio]

Originally Posted by dasbin

I don't think ECM8000's are the best option for this at all, due to their very poor SNR.

Never had that problem with the emc's , but i record 'music' wich is 99% of the time louder then conversation level.
The beyer m101 (omnis dynamic) are cool to. need's a bit more gain

Originally Posted by tuf

very low cost condensors

How low ?

Maybe the mxl 603s or v69

[keyboardman]

Howdy

I always use an EV635 for that. In a pinch, you can use it as a drumstick.