My wife is into a television show called Truth Be Told on Apple TV+. It's about a podcaster named Poppy Parnell. Her podcast setup is on a table in her dining room or spare room. It’s a good recording setup. She's got a mixer. She wears headphones to monitor herself. She captures the audio with professional recording software. She records into a nice, large diaphragm condenser microphone with a pop filter.
The issue that floors me is her microphone is often shown facing away from her face, about a quarter turn in the wrong direction.
Instead of her mouth facing toward the front of the microphone where the pickup is, she talks into the side. The microphone’s sides are framed with a brass component, and that’s where she’s speaking. Some microphones, like my MXL v67i, have a dual pickup pattern where you can speak either into the front, or flip a switch and speak into the back, because that’s another pickup area. But Poppy's mouth isn't speaking in the direction of the mic's pickup pattern. She's speaking toward the side of the mic.
Luckily, over the show’s three seasons, this doesn’t occur in each episode. But it makes me wonder why the director continued filming the podcast scenes when the audio consultant was on his lunch break.
Don’t make the same mistake as Truth Be Told’s director. Before recording your podcast, always check to make sure you’re speaking into your microphone’s pickup pattern. Speaking into the wrong area of the microphone will not give you the warm, connected, conversational audio that you’re trying to achieve to grow your audience.
