ALL DJS MUST KNOW THIS!! | MICROPHONES FOR DUMMIES

Today we're going to be going through microphones, specifically wireless microphones for dummies, and I'm not going to lie, I'm not the smartest person when it comes to wireless microphones, but I have learned a lot from a lot of smarter people, and I'm going to dumb that down today and explain to you guys everything I know and that we use to make microphones, wireless microphones, work consistently at all our events with no real issues. So let's go through it. First off, there are a lot of wireless microphone brands out there. All of them in reality are really, really good. You have Shure, which is known as the industry standard. We also have Sennheiser and Audio-Technica, probably the top three big name brand wireless microphone systems out there. You also have some smaller companies like Phoenix Pro that are making some good stuff, and there's some varieties along those lines. The first thing I want to debunk is just talking about RF microphones versus digital microphones. Digital microphones are like what I'm using right now. We've got these Hollylands we're using right now, DGI makes them, Rode makes them, and even Audio-Technica, Shure, and all of them make digital 2.4 or 5 gigahertz digital microphones. Personally, I would stay away from all of them. Anyone in high-end corporate concerts, they're not using digital microphones. When you look at the spectrum of frequencies available, RF mics have a frequency range of about this, and digital mics have like this. And in that little digital band is everything under the sun that runs 2.4 or 5 gigahertz. It's your phone, it's your car, it's every single Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, anything in the range is operating in that digital range, which makes it very crowded of a space to work with. You also don't have really good range in them. Personally, if you guys are using digital mics, I highly recommend you get rid of them and get yourself some RF mics that operate in the frequency bands that we are used to here in America. UK and that, you guys might be a little bit different. But for the most part, we're operating in the 400-ish up to about 600. Another thing, if you're using RF mics from five plus years ago, most of those mics are operating in the 600 megahertz band. That band was bought by T-Mobile, I believe in 2018, 2019. And that band is no longer usable for us DJs to be reliable, you will run into interference problems. So that's the first thing is to just talk about buying good quality microphones. You want to buy microphones, I would honestly say from those three brands. Shure makes great stuff. Sennheiser makes great stuff. Audio-Technica makes great stuff, but make sure they are RF microphones. The next feature that I think you need to make sure it has is a scan feature. Every one of them is different. I will show you guys on our Audio-Technica how we scan. But you want to have a microphone, a wireless microphone system that can scan the room that you're in or the outdoor space that you're in and tell you what frequencies are available to use. This is going to be the best case scenario for setting yourself up to not fail and have good quality wireless microphones that can be heard. There's a step further that we'll talk about that I've learned through the corporate sphere, which is you can use network style mics. They have an ethernet port on the back here that you can plug these into your router. From a computer, you can scan the room and use even more sophisticated tools. There's what's called Workbench. All the brands have it, Shure Workbench, Audio-Technica Workbench, Sennheiser Workbench. Inside of that, you can assign and set up multiple different microphones. You can actually see the spectrum that it is scanning and look even more in depth into what frequencies might be available. You can also put in there, if there's some TV channels in your area, you can punch all that in to make sure that your mics have the best chance for making sure they're going to be clear. Now that we've talked about buying good mics, let's talk about the mics themselves. We have handhelds and we have body packs. There are some minute differences between those, but in general, you have your handheld microphones. There's different styles of handheld microphones. I personally like a good quality cardioid mic. This is the basic mic that comes with Audio-Technica. I bought the little bit more expensive one. It sounds a little bit better. It's better for singers, but in general, a good base level cardioid handheld microphone works well. Body packs, these are probably the most versatile piece of wireless tech that exists because you can hook up to it a lapel, which I have here. I'll get another piece out. You can hook up a traditional lapel, which I'm actually wearing right now. They have different styles of lapels. You have cardioid and then you have omni. Those are the two different styles of microphones you're going to find. A omni-directional microphone is what it sounds like, omni. It has no real direction. It picks up all the way around the microphone, in front of it, behind it, sideways. Same thing with a handheld. You don't really find omni-directional handhelds. That's very rare. Mostly in your lapels, you find that. Or you have cardioid or super cardioid. Cardioid just means that it is directional. It is picking up in the direction that it is pointing and it's like a cone. Super cardioid is an even tighter cone, so it helps with eliminating the background noise or preventing feedback. I'm a big proponent of using cardioid style lapels, especially in ceremonies, to prevent feedback coming from the speaker. That's just my personal opinion. Other people use omnis with good success as well. But that's not necessarily what this video is about. There also is, with a body pack, you can also hook up to it. We have it right here. A countryman or a Britney Spears style headsets, these also comment on omni-directional and cardioid. These just go behind the ear, make it a little more conspicuous. Use these a lot for corporate events. I personally like them as well. And again, I buy cardioid versions to help with feedback elimination. Omni-directionals are better for plays where you're putting a microphone on an actor and the actor's kind of moving around. But these are really nice. I prefer these because they sit on the face of the person talking. And if they turn, the microphone stays in the same position. With a lapel, if you are turning your head left and right and you're using a cardioid, it'll actually change the volume level. So as you turn this way, it won't be as bright. I believe this is an omni-directional lapel though, so it might be picking up a lot better. But in general, that's the concept. If you've ever done an event or a ceremony and you know if the person bends down like this, it gets louder. Or if they turn their head or if they look up, the volume level changes and you have to adjust that. There's different audio tools you can use with gates and compression to adjust that. That's not this video. One of my new found favorite things to use with body packs and that is to use them for wireless speaker configurations or instruments too. You can even bring instruments into this, which basically this is a converter that gives you a female XLR. And you can plug that into anything. They even have ones that have quarter inch as well. You can plug that into a guitar. That's how you get a wireless guitar. You can plug it into a violinist, a DI pack that's plugged into a piano. You can make basically anything wireless. You can plug this into a podium mic and make it wireless. I love using this tool. You can also use it to run wireless speakers. So you can plug this into your mixer and send audio to the receiver to get audio. That's another touch point that I want to clarify with terminology that I see a lot of DJs getting wrong. These are transmitters. These are the receivers. The audio goes from this to this. That's what makes this a transmitter. And that's what makes this a receiver. A lot of people screw that up and think that, you know, I need a bigger antenna for more power. This is not a transmitter. This is a receiver. You're making the antenna that's receiving the bigger. There also is different output powers for these transmitters. Every manufacturer is different. Every manufacturer has different output powers in general. Our stuff has high output power of 30 watts and low output of 10 watts. What's the difference? Well, one, it's how far it can transmit that range. If you need to be in a football stadium and have this microphone be picked up by that wireless mic receiver box on the other side of the stadium, you better be running high power. The problem with high power is it crowds that area. We'll see this on the network chart, but if you have a 30 watt, you're going to have a wider band being picked up on the receiver. If you have a lower one, it'll be a lot smaller. So if you're doing a corporate event or say a play and you need to pack a lot of wireless microphones into a stage, like you need 10 mics running at a time, you would run them all on a lower output power. I know a lot of the SureStuff can go all the way down to one watt output or one milliwatt output. Really low output to smash a lot of microphones in there, but typically the receivers are really, really close to where the wireless is at. That's how you run a lot of this stuff. For us personally, a lot of the stuff that we're running, we are running a good distance. Ceremonies, 50 feet to 100 feet. We're only running a couple microphones. I pretty much leave all of ours in high power. It's very rare at a corporate event that we are running more than about four microphones at a time. So for the most part, we're able to manage running all of our stuff at high output power, but that is something to consider if you get further down the rabbit hole. So now that we covered the transmitter side of our body pack and our handhelds, let's talk about our receivers. And this is pretty much traditional. What you will find with any manufacturer, you have single box receivers. Each one of these box does one wireless microphone. If you get into some more advanced stuff, Shure I know makes a dual unit that this box will actually handle two wireless inputs and they make a quad single rack. So the space that two of these boxes take up, you can fit four into one of those. They do come with a nice hefty price tag. Honestly, for most of us DJs, it's not really a concern. Most of us don't need that many wireless microphones, but if you're talking about a corporate event or a play where you need 12 microphones using three quad units and only taking up three use in your rack is a lot nicer than taking up six. That's just the name of the game. Now, most of us are not using just one mic box, but if we are, we have to attach antennas to the back of it. And you can also extend these antennas. If you're doing it in a built-in situation, you need some cabling. And I'll show you guys some configurations in this pre-built out mic rack that we have here, uh, how that works to extend them as well. Let's talk about antennas. These are quarter wave antennas. These are what a lot of microphones come with out of the box. They come with quarter wave antennas. They're great. They work really well with audio technical stuff. If you want to be able to receive better, you can go to half waves. These are just a bigger receiver. It's got more surface area to pick up more frequencies coming into it. Works really well. And then if you need even more receiving capabilities, you move on to something like this, which is a fin. For most of us, DJs, you do not need fins. I see so many DJs using fins at ceremonies, and I'm, I'm just confused what you guys are doing just because it's bigger does not mean it works better. If you set up your wireless mics properly, you don't need a fin. Does it work better at corporate events? Yeah. That's why we use it at corporate events because we're picking up multiple frequencies and we're going all day. Uh, I, the DJs that I see using fins, it's, it's overkill in my opinion. I don't even use a fin at my DJ ceremonies because I don't need it. It's not necessary. I use half waves though. I like half waves a lot more. Let's talk about combining microphones. A lot of us are running multiple microphones. One of the worst things you can do is set up two microphones on top of each other like this, where the antennas are touching each other. This is not a good look. The antennas can be here, but they need to have separation. They cannot be touching each other. If they're spread out like this, you also want to V them out. If you can, that just helps with better, uh, pickup ability. And contrary to belief, your microphones are not using both antennas. In most scenarios with these microphones, this is a dual receiver. The microphone is bouncing back and forth between these two antennas to give you the best possible situation. It's another reason why these are better than digital. You have two antennas working at all times to help you with the best thing. It's another point of a lot of people in the comments have been telling me, uh, why do you use, you should use an IEM system for my wireless speaker setup? Well, an IEM system is only a one antenna system. This is a true diversity, dual antenna system. I'm giving myself better capabilities of making sure that that signal stays solid. So if we don't want two microphones like this, how can we combine these antennas into just two antennas? So we don't have four. Well, there's a couple of ways to do that. We can use passive combiners. These right here are two EV passive combiners. Basically these take the inputs of the A antenna from both of these. We would hook them up and gives you one input. It's not an output. This is an input to the antenna. So you'd hook it up right here, or you can use a cable and extend that further out. The downside to this though, is you lose half of the input capability, half of the receiving capabilities with this. That's why they work though for our audio technicus here in our ceremony racks that we use for DJing. We have two of these. We use passive combiners because we're basically taking that quarter inch wave antenna and we slap a half wave on it. So we lose half of it. So this half wave turns into a quarter wave antenna using the passive combiner setup. That's the way to do it. The better way to do it is what's in this rack right here. Inside of this rack right here, we have used a active combiner. That is passive. It does not require power. This one is active. It does require power, but it has no loss in the receiving capabilities when you are combining microphones together. And a lot of times it actually increases your ability. You can hook up fins to this. I would not hook up a fin directly to a single microphone. Also that's a pretty stupid use of a fin to hook up to a single microphone. This right here combines all the antennas. We would have to go into the gutsiness to show you, but all four of the A's go into one combiner. All four of the B's go into another combiner. And it also will allow you to link multiple combiners together. So if you have a segment here of four microphones, you can have another segment in another combiner. When I was talking about the Shure dual units and quad units that they sell, all of that combining of antennas is already done internally for you. And it only has two antenna outputs, but this is kind of your ultimate. If you need more than two microphones, get one of these active combiners. Personally, you should, they're just better to have in general. We don't have them in our ceremony rigs because we run those all remote battery powered. And it's a little bit cheaper than buying an active combiner. The other nice part about the active combiner is it also combines all of your power for your microphones. So instead of needing to have four blocks, it actually has four power outputs and we power that combiner with just one IEC. And that makes our life a million times easier. Quick notes on cabling. This right here is some antenna cable. This is RF based antenna cable. I made a mistake when I first built my first ever ceremony rack. I was having all sorts of issues with not getting good microphone signals. So I reached out to Ben Stowe at NLFX. He's been a great resource to teach me a lot of things about wireless and how wireless works. And the first thing he said was send me a list of all the cables you bought. And I sent him a list and he said, that's a TV cable. The cable matters, believe it or not. You need to make sure you're using cable. These are BC connector cables that are made to use with wireless technologies and not TV like an SDI cable. So there's a little, make sure you buy the right cables. This is a little plug. I have no affiliation. I don't make any money, but I do buy a lot of stuff from NLFX and they've taught me a lot over the years. NLFX makes cables. So if you need any sort of cables made, you need a combiner, you need a back plate. We'll show you the back plate that we have here. I just made this one myself, but NLFX will make custom back plates for you with all the cabling you need. I highly recommend them to anybody that is like me and you're a dummy. You don't know much about wireless. They can help you. They can teach you. They can make sure you buy the right mics that work in your right area, because depending on where you do most of your events, there are different bands that some of these receiver boxes are set up for than others. So reach out to them and all of their cables come off a lifetime warranty. I just found this out literally recently. I was talking with Kyle from NLFX at an event. We bought all of our SDIs and I have a hundred foot SDI that's no longer working because one of the ends is broken. He's like, just send it back to us. We'll fix it for free. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, all of our cables come with a 100% warranty for life. If it breaks, send it to us. We'll fix it. We send it back. It's been great. It's an awesome. So you don't have to try and fix it yourself and solder all that. So from the front side here, like I said, we have these quad combiners there, and we also have one right down there and we're actually able to link those together, which is cool. And then we run it all through a fin up here, or we have halfway of antennas. We could also plug in onto the back here. These quad combiners have a cascade here, and that cascade can be used to link two combiners together. So what I did here is we took the output of this. This is the two outputs, A and B from that quad combiner. And we're able to then put that into the cascade of this combiner. And now these two outputs right here on top are fed to our fin. So all eight microphones now are running through the fin or actually the fin is feeding the signal to all eight microphones through the combiner. Pretty easy to do. And now the cool part is all of our microphones in this setup are networked with Ethernet jacks. So what we've done is I have a Ethernet combiner in here that combines all those into one Ethernet cord. And then we simply plug that in to a simple router. Now you could get more complicated. You could use Dante with these microphones as well. It's more advanced, but in general, you just need to run them all through a wireless network. We do not have internet running to this wireless network right here. This is a TP-Link router that creates a wifi network that I can then connect a computer to or a tablet to do control things from this unit. So I'm going to go over to the computer now and open up Audio-Technica's wireless manager. And I'll show you guys how that works to do that. But before that, I want to show you guys how you basically scan using the traditional microphones right here. Like I said, these microphones have the ability to scan and they don't need to necessarily be running through combiners. So what we do is we go down to group scan. And I always like to scan on groups 8 and 9 and 10. That just opens up more of the band that it's actually scanning for. And then you can use normal, high, or low. So I always go normal right in the middle for scanning to give me some frequencies. And what that'll do is just scan and we have 17 open frequencies. And it can show you now a list of all the frequencies that it considers to be open in the clear that you can use for your event. And one little tip, I like to look for groupings of multiple frequencies together. So you guys can see at the bottom there, 529 is just hanging out by itself. We have a cluster of two 527s. We have one 523. We have two 522s. And we have two 520s. Let's see here. And then at the top, we have three 500s. So personally, I like choosing the middle one there where we have three of them grouped together. But you want to look for clusters. You don't want frequencies that are out by themselves because that means that there's frequencies kind of budding up right against them. And then you would simply select that frequency. And then you could also sync that via the IR. You can sync right there with this microphone. And now this microphone is set up to run on that channel. That's how you do it when you just have a couple of these units. If you're running them into like a quad like this, it is best to scan using a feature on a computer like this where you have Workbench. So now with the one microphone in here, this is our network mic. This is the screen where we can actually add more microphones too. So you only need one network mic in reality to be able to use this software, which is super nice. So you can buy the cheaper units that don't have the Ethernet port. The only benefit of having the Ethernet port is you can live update the actual frequencies to those boxes. But you still have to go through and sync all of your transmitters to those receivers. So in my opinion, it doesn't really save much time. It's just a little bit more convenient and eliminates issues where you might have actually put the wrong frequency. So if I go down to the bottom right here, I can click Add. I'm going to go to Audio Technica. I'm using the R310s. So I got to find R310 on here. There we go. ATW R3210 is mine. The R3210N are the network mics. And then these are all the frequency bands I could be operating in. I operate in North Carolina and we use the DE2 band, which I believe is 490 MHz to 580 something. So I can actually verify that and show you in a second. But say I need three more of those mics, I can add them in. Now I have one, two, three, four total microphones and then one network mic. So I'm going to basically coordinate a five channel, five microphone channel setup, depending on how many mics and channels you need. So you set up your device list and then you go over to this Frequency Monitor. You go over to Frequency Coordinator. Inside of Frequency Coordinator, we need to do an RF scan. So first thing I want to do is set up my TV channel settings. So this is really nice. This is an additional feature that you don't have on the built-in scan, but basically I can go through and what I'm going to do is we're in North America and we are in the United States. We are in North Carolina. And then the specific city I'm in right now is Greensboro. And this, I can click Apply Now. So what it does is it applies the TV channels that are in my region that could affect my frequency. So I click Apply. Boom. And now you can see on our frequency band here, these are where all those TV channels live. And this goes from 400 up to 800. So most of the TV channels are outside of the frequency band that I'm operating in, but that's different for every single city. So you want to add in those yourself. You can also add in exclusions in here specifically. So if there is a specific wireless microphone that's being used by say another DJ in the same building as you, you can add an exclusion for there. But what we're going to do is go to RF scan. And just to show you guys a little reference, I'm going to turn on one of these transmitters right now. I'm going to turn on this body pack to show you guys in the RF scan, how it shows up. When you are doing an RF scan though at the venue, you want all of your transmitters off, but I'm going to show you guys what it looks like when one of these is on. So that way you can see a little reference point. So we're going to click RF scan. We're going to select our device, which is that networked, that networked microphone. We select it. And then we are going to start our scan. And as you can see right there, it is scanning between 470.125 and 929.975. That is specifically the DE2 band that my microphones do operate in. So it's only scanning that range right there. As you can see, it's going through and scanning all of the microphone scans in that area. And then we'll be able to blow it up and see exactly where it is. We should see a huge spike at 500.9, which is where this transmitter is operating. So right there is that spike. Look at that spike right there. You can see it. All right, our scan is complete. We can click okay. And like I said, we can zoom in here. I got to get my mouse just right. We can zoom in to see specifically the band we're dealing with. And as you can see, you know, you can look along and you can see where there is some interference coming in from different devices, different things. And we see this large spike here. I can scroll over at the 500.718. That is exactly where that transmitter is. So this is how you can kind of recognize that there might be other microphone transmitters operating in your area. You can also see how, you can also see how we get some more noise where I'm at right now when we get up into the 500 to 510 to 530. That's all cool. Now, this is just for you guys to see visually because what is really cool about this software is it'll tell you what frequencies to use. So we're just going to click apply. And then we click close. Now that frequency band is populated here onto the bigger picture. So you can see there's TV channel exclusives. And this is the range we scanned to see what is working, what is not. And you can see it already pulled out and said, hey, this frequency right here, we don't want to use it because that's where this guy's at. But if I had it turned off, it wouldn't show there. So what I want to do now is we want to go through and add all of our devices in here so we can do a frequency plan. So I'm going to click this on the bottom left. I'm going to select all of our devices and I'm going to add them in. Perfect. So now what I can do is I can tell the system what each of my microphones is set to and what kind of priority I want that microphone to have before we go through and plan. So as you can see right here, this one, you can see this one is network. So it shows you that it's already set to that channel, the 529. We can adjust the power setting to tell them we're running on high or low power. And then the stability, I can either choose to make this a more robust channel where I want it to have a more, a better chance of basically being guaranteed it's not going to have problems, or I can set it as a standard or just a really low priority. So I'm going to click more robust on three of these microphones and then standard to the other two. That's typically what we do. We'll set like, you know, the podium mic, if we run that wirelessly, we want it to be a high priority or say this is the MC's microphone for the night. I want it to be a high priority, make it a really robust channel. So now what we'll do is we'll click frequency plan. And what it will do is it will actually create a list of all the channels that we want to use. Now there's a couple different modes you can use right here at the top. You can use default, lower or upper. And that just basically, is it going to use the lower end of the frequency band, the higher end of the frequency band, or is it going to do a mix of all the above? I'm just going to click default. That's what a lot of times I do. And I click calculate. And right there are all of the channels that it's telling me to use. It's telling me to use 47.125 and 47.425 for our more robust channels and 529.975. So it's basically giving me all the channels I need to operate in, which is beautiful. I click apply, done, click save. And now here are all the channels that I need to use. And the nice part is I can deploy those. So if all of these microphones were networked, I could deploy them to the boxes. So by hitting deploy, it went ahead and went to the one device that I have networked and changed that channel for me in real time. So a lot of times at corporate events, the mic rack might be behind the stage. It might not be in front of the house. You can automatically change those channels. Super cool. But this software right here gives you kind of the best chance possible when you're scanning for frequencies. Is it something that DJs should be using? Probably not. I never use it at my events. I just use the built-in scanner. Works really well. This is what we use at the corporate level. But I wanted to show you guys microphones for dummies across the board and show you guys all the possibilities and all the things you can do with your microphones. So that right there is pretty much my quick and dirty take at microphones for dummies for you guys from another dummy. I'm not going to pretend here, guys, that I know everything about wireless. I'm an expert. I've only been doing wireless, you know, for the last eight years. And I would say, honestly, I've been learning this whole entire time and I learn things every single day from new people. I didn't even get into it this video, but this is a fin. There are different types of antennas. There's these things called grenades that you work more like a omnidirectional one that you can set near the stage and it picks up everything around it. This is a directional fin, so you can point it longer distances to get signal from different areas. There's different types of fins. There's a lot of different things we can get into when it comes to microphones and everything related to them. And there's a lot of stuff I don't even know down below. So I would love for you guys to leave down the comments down below what additional microphone videos you might want to see, what you want me to go into in depth in, and all that. But I do want to leave you with this one little thing. This right here, they're on Amazon. You can get these color-coded, but this right here is a game-changer for your handhelds. You slide that on and now your handheld, it's not going to roll all over the table. It sits right there and also it prevents the classic when someone sets the mic down the table, you know, goes po-dump through the speakers. This little thing keeps it from doing that and it's really helpful. So that's on Amazon. It'll be linked down below. But that is wireless microphones for dummies. Stay tuned for the next one.