Know you gear!

Know you gear!

"Know your gear!" should be a sticker on every sound engineer's bags.

This is both simple and true! 
Many of the available articles, tips and tricks originate from this.
We recommend that every junior sound engineer take the time to get to know their gear. Even experienced engineers can benefit from continued practice. It can happen at any time, that you may need to very quickly find the right setting, but searching through the menus could take too long, causing you to miss a great opportunity to record something awesome. So, it's always good to be prepared.

But it is not only about knowing the functions and features of your gear It's also about how you can use your gear to overcome challenges and difficult situations.
Understanding how things work internally allows you to develop skilled solutions to problems.
For example, you can learn how to build a figure-of-eight microphone when one is urgently needed but unavailable. In the arcticle "Make one out of two!" we discribe this in more detail. 

Or you may ask yourself, what will happen, if you combine a "cardioid" with an "omni" like the ones with the rubberband around them.

As you may have guessed, it's a wide cardioid. The great thing is that you can adjust its shape by adjusting the microphone gains.
The idea was "developed" more by accident. We didn't have enough microphone clamps, so we came up with this solution. 
Of course, the omnis were too close for the intended LFE purpose (they weren't decorrelated enough), but when we blended the hypercardioid (below) with the omni (above), we had some additional opportunities.
In this case, not having enough microphone clamps was unfortunate, but if you understand microphone patterns, you can turn a loss into a win. 

That's exactly what we're talking about!
Understanding how things work gives you more opportunities to overcome critical situations.

That's why we sometimes set things up in an uncommon way, record something, and listen to it to decide how it could be used. Sometimes the decision is to forget about it. So it all comes done to:

"Know your gear!"