 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. For this video today, I want to talk about why if you are a YouTuber or a recording artist or anyone else who owns a microphone, why you may want to own also a white noise machine or at least a white noise app on your phone. Now, this is actually not my idea at all. I'm only passing on info from the audio grates from Curtis Judge, whose YouTube channel I'm an enormous fan of. The other YouTube channel I really love for everything audio related is sound speeds. I'm going to put links to both those guys in the video description because I've just learned so much from both of them. But something that Curtis Judge does in a lot of his videos and I never thought about doing myself and then I realized I totally could because I happened to own a number of white noise machines is using a white noise maker to learn the polar pattern or the pickup pattern of your microphone. Now, I explained in one of these videos recently, I bought this Audio Technica AT 2020 a couple of months ago and I did what probably a lot of people do when they buy microphones. You take one look at the user manual and the polar pattern diagram which has all the degrees and you say, okay, I got it. It's this type of microphone and you throw it in the bin. And that unfortunately was a bad move because I was watching another YouTube video a couple of nights ago on the top mistakes you do not want to make with the Audio Technica AT 2020 starting with not using phantom power. And there I was thinking I'm very smug. I don't need to watch this video. And tip two was make sure you're not speaking into the back of the microphone. And I said, lo and behold, I am speaking into the back of this microphone. Now what would have saved me from this fate would have been to stick on a pair of monitoring headphones after I bought this microphone and do a white noise test, which is what I'm going to do now. So here's my friendly white noise generator. I own the Lectrofan. I use it to block annoying noise going on outside my office, which happens probably about 30% of the time. But if you don't want to use a dedicated standalone white noise generator, you could totally just use your phone. And for the purpose of this demo, I just have it. I have my Lectrofan plugged into a power bank here. Now I'm going to turn this on in a second. The idea of learning the polar pattern with this is you want to bring your white noise machine around the microphone so you can figure out firstly where the pickup is good. Secondly, how good the off-axis rejection is. In other words, the areas that are supposed to be outside the polar pattern, how good is it actually rejecting saying what kind of a difference is it. Now for instance, if I was smarter when I went into owning the AudioTechnica AT2020, I would have learned two things. Firstly, this is what's called a side address microphone, which means you're supposed to speak into the side. In fact, possibly a little bit too high. It's not a top or end address microphone, which would be a microphone that's intended to speak in here. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to turn on my white noise maker in a second. I'm going to firstly put the white noise maker here so you should be able to see how the audio sounds coming from its intended position in the front and side address. Secondly, I'm going to move the white noise maker here so you guys can hear how much worse the audio sounds when I am speaking from the front. Secondly, I'm going to move it to the sides of the microphone so that you can hear how that off-axis rejection is from both side directions. Finally, I'm going to bring the white noise machine right on top, simulating speaking into the microphone incorrectly as if it were a top address microphone. And finally, just so that you can hear the difference between speaking right up to the microphone, I'm literally almost touching the phone. And speaking at a distance, I'm going to bring the microphone to a few commonly recommended speaking differences. Distances, one of them is going to be four fingers. Then I'm going to do one fist. And then I'm going to do about two fists, which is probably the way I'd naturally tend to, the kind of natural distance I would tend to keep if I had it set up like I do now on my desk. So let's go. White noise machine is on and I'm going to step back so that you're going to be hearing the white noise machine and not my voice. So that that was back pickup. And now we're going to do front pickup the wrong side of the microphone. I can actually bring it around so you can hear the difference clearly. This is front. I hope that was useful. So now we're now we're going to compare front pickup with and this is again a side address microphone. We're going to compare side address with incorrect top or end address. I can just see looking at the level meter here that the difference is keeping roughly the same distance between the microphone and the white noise generator, much more efficient pickup in the side address as intended. Finally, let's take a quick listen to the off access rejection and going to it shouldn't be any different based on the polar pattern. We're going to pick, put the white noise generator firstly in the back, then I'm going to move over to the right side, then the left side, and then just to wrap up this comparison, I'm going to move it all around 360 degrees so you can hear all the differences. Yeah, I've accidentally changed the type of white noise, but it shouldn't make a difference. This is more like brown noise, deeper frequencies. Finally, let's just use this guy for a proximity test. I'm going to test the proximity of the picker pattern and it's intended pickup area at the front of the microphone and also in the back. Actually, I'm just going to track. I'm just going to test the front one fist, two fists. Here we go guys. That is how that is why it may be useful if you're trying to learn the polar pattern of your new microphone to have a white noise generator either using one of the apps on your phone or buying a standalone white noise generator, move it around, look at the polar pattern diagram and then move your white noise generator as you monitor the audio or as you record and play back listening to the differences between the various sides just so you can get a good feel for where the intended pickup zone of the microphone is, how good it is at rejection and other characteristics of the microphone that it may be useful to know before you go and record a bunch of audio with it. Hope that video was useful if you do want to subscribe for more videos about videography, audio and related subjects. Do consider hitting that subscribe button. Thank you guys very much for staying with me and watching this video.