Microphone Patterns

Some mics may have a fixed pattern while some have a variable pattern that you can adjust. Knowing what you'll be recording will help narrow down your choices.

Here are some of the most common patterns:

This setup will "listen" to sounds coming from all directions.

Not very useful for the studio since you are often trying to get sound from a specific source.

You can't "point" this one anywhere because it hears in all directions... 360 degrees.

Maybe fun to play around with, but you should stay away from this unless you have a very particular goal in mind.


Cardiod

On the other hand, the cardiod microphone pattern is very common and quite useful.

As you can see it detects sound directly in front of it but far less from each side and almost nothing from behind.

This pattern works well for studio situations where reflections are not desired or live applications where stray sounds are present.

An outstanding edition to your studio - if you are unsure about this decision, go with this one and you won't be sorry.

This is what would result if you took 2 cardiods and put them back to back. It captures sounds from both directly in front of and directly behind the diaphragm input.

This might be used to capture reflections from the room to add color to the sound, but there are other ways to do this if you need to.

Once again, this is more of a specialty pattern as you wouldn't typically want to get what is on the other side of the mic from the performer or instrument.



Hyper Cardiod

A variation of the straight cardiod discussed earlier, sometimes called a super cardiod. This pattern is like a combination of the cardiod and figure-8.

It detects primarily from the front but also gets some signal from directly behind.

Some may want the additional sensitivity away from the sound source, but this may be risky in an untreated room, such as the rooms of a basic home studio in your house.

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