Microphone placement for interviews … the “Hat Mic”

Here is a very good microphone placement technique I learned years ago for recording audio interviews and corporate educational materials.  Some people have called this the “Hat Mic” or “Hat (Mic) Trick” technique.  I’m posting this so more people can learn this great miking technique.

It involves is clipping a lavalier/lapel microphone to the brim of a baseball cap as shown here:

Then putting on the hat mic and running the microphone cable behind a ear and to the recorder or computer mic port.

This miking technique has several advantages.  The most important ones are a constant fixed distance between the speaker’s mouth and the microphone (really helps with setting gain levels) and the microphone is out of the breath path of the person speaking (removes breathing on the mic and plosives).

Here is a MP3 audio example of the the hat mic technique in action.

Here is a direct link to the MP3 example:  http://tribalgrowth.com/files/4scoreHM.output.mp3

The WAV audio was recorded with a Olympus LS-10 and “Hat Mic”.  The MP3 audio was edited and produced using Audacity and the Levelator.

Here are the blog posts where I initially found and learned about the Hat Mic technique.

• Hat (Mic) Trick for recording Interviews
• The “Hat Mic

Hope this was useful. Enjoy!

– Dom