Audio-Technica has been offering a series of resources that help users adjust to the circumstances brought about by the health crisis, including blog posts and tutorials educating on best practices and ideal solutions for content creation and live-streaming, developing a home setup and more. Since stay-at-home orders have essentially turned us all into self-taught video producers, of particular note is the “Basic Audio Techniques for Video” tutorial series on YouTube, which features 13 different videos covering the basics of handheld and lavalier mics, wireless systems, boom mics and more – concepts that are more important than ever in the DIY era of social distancing. The videos are short and engaging, easy to follow and filled with useful info. Most of the techniques outlined in these videos are applicable to both a home setup and the wider world of video production in the field (once our lives return to normal).

In the clip “Selecting the Right Handheld Mic,” different types of handheld mics are compared and contrasted, with a short demonstration of the properties of cardioid pickup patterns. Additionally, lavalier mics are outlined in multiple videos, with an overview of different types of lavaliers and their uses, the technique of “reflected lavalier miking” (which uses a lavalier taped to a hard surface as a boundary-type microphone), strategies for hiding lavaliers out of sight, how to use a tie bar clip to fasten a lavalier to a video subject, and the basic use of lavalier windscreens. Boom-miking fundamentals are also explored, with “Intro to Booming” comparing different types of audio capture to demonstrate the clear and crisp audio offered by boom placement of shotgun mics.