Aside from the 4 a.m. call time (ouch), it was a typical day. Classroom auditorium, not a set. A charismatic host between two women from the local university, and a topic nobody saw coming: cheese. (Yes really. It’s pretty cool, actually.) My job was to get both the video and the audio, and get both of them right.
I popped the audio case open and counted two lavs.
I’d packed three.
Nobody’s fault but my own. The third one wasn’t in another bag, wasn’t in an adjoining room, wasn’t under the table, and sure wasn’t going to grow back by the time we rolled. With two guests, a host, and two mics, I had about ninety seconds before the host wanted to know what I was fiddling with.
Pass-the-mic was out. These were working professionals, not a game show segment, and the audio would’ve suffered every time it changed hands. I looked at the seating — host in the middle, guest on his right, guest on his left — and a cheaper idea showed up.
I clipped one lav on the host. I clipped the other on the guest to his left. The guest on his right didn’t get a mic.
When the host turned his head to address her, which he was going to do every time he asked her a question, because that’s just what interviewers do, his lapel mic would pick her up on the rebound. Not brilliantly. But enough to work with in post. The host was, through no fault of his own, now a human mic stand.
It worked, which is a sentence I’m still a little uncomfortable typing.
The audio on the un-mic’d guest sat a few dB quieter than the other two, exactly like I figured. A pass of gain automation and a gentle EQ nudge in post got all three voices balanced, and the finished piece plays clean. If you didn’t know I was down a mic, you wouldn’t catch it.
Here’s the lesson, and it’s not the glamorous one. Gear lists are a one-person fault-tolerance system. I thought I had three mics because I had meant to pack three mics, and meaning to pack something is exactly zero mics away from actually packing it. Count your gear before you leave. Count it again when you get there. And if you do show up short, don’t panic — the room usually gives you an answer if you look at how people are actually going to sit.
Also, the third mic turned up two weeks later in the bottom of a bag I’d sworn I’d checked.
Of course it did.
