Microphone Placement

This week has been an exercise in finding the optimum area for placing the contact mic I bought a few weeks ago. So what I wanted to record was an old Tibetan singing bowl I’ve had for years which sounds incredible and multi tonal. I wondered what levels of sound vibration a contact mic would pick up?

I initially attached the mic to the side of the bowl just under the rim and immediately discovered it deadened the sound and there was no vibration at all. I moved it in different places all around the bowl and thought I’d been defeated in that quest until I tried attaching the mic to the underneath part. This seemed to work if I used the wooden baton to make the sound on the rim of the bowl. I almost had to hold the bowl at a slight angle to prevent the mic from stopping the sound waves again, but it worked and I recorded a couple of minutes of sound to build upon.

What I wanted to know was the difference in sound quality between recording a singing bowl with a contact mic and then using a surround sound mic function on my Zoom recorder. So both tests have now been recorded and I’m aiming to transfer them into Cubase and listen/edit…