145. From The Stage To The Console

Well, they definitely fall into the buy once, cry once mentality for me.

I abhor cheap mic stands.

Yes.

A mic stand has one job, right? It's to stand and hold the mic in the place where you put it and be able to get to where you need it to go.

So, you know, the simplest one has got the round base and it's heavy, you know, made of metal and it's got a single pole coming up.

That straight stand is great for people that are just standing at a microphone and talking if they don't want to hold on to the microphone.

But if they're playing an instrument, we want to give them a boom arm so that their instrument is not banging up against that, you know, vertical part of the mic stand.

And they can get close to the mic without having to lean over.

And, you know, there's some vibe to that.

You know, if you're an old folk singer or something like that, you know, that's fine for the vibe.

But for most people that are just playing and singing comfortably...

The mic should boom out so that they don't run into that, right? They have room to move and be around that.

One thing that's really helpful when you're setting up mic stands, this is my kind of rule, is like one thing gets loosened at a time, right? So if you've got to make an adjustment to the length of the boom, maybe it needs to come out a little bit farther, you loosen that one nut, You move it, you tighten that one back down, and then you go to try to move something else.

Because if you end up with multiple things loose at one time, you are going to get yourself in quite the pickle trying to get all those adjusted and tightened down.

And you let go of the microphone and the whole thing drops down because you had the height adjustment loosened as well.

Yeah, save yourself a lot of grief by...

Loosen one thing, adjust it, tighten it back down.

It's just going to make your life easier.

So get into the habit of adjusting one thing at a time.

And then also like, The boom part of the mic stand, I'm looking at the one that I've got right here, it's got these little pads that's kind of squeezed together to create enough friction so that it doesn't keep flopping down.

And eventually those do wear out.

Those little pads can be replaced so that you don't get like the sinking singer syndrome.

I didn't make that up before just right now, but you know, somebody can be playing at the keyboard and then suddenly their head has to go down to like where the microphone's at.

And it's, It would be comical if it wasn't tragic, right? Yes.

So make sure that your equipment is in good working order.