Microphone is too "sensitive."

Question

Hi, I don't know much about microphone equipment. But lately I've been using the Blue Snowball Ice Mic with pop filter, and it works well when I'm talking in a casual, normal voice. But there are some scenes where I must scream into the mic (like for a cartoon character raging), and of course in Audition, the levels turn red and goes above the 0 mark in the level bar. I try recording further and further away from the mic, and I can only manage to get the levels under the 0 mark when I'm way on the other side of the room; but at this point, no matter how I EQ it, the quality isn't good, as you would expect. I've seen videos of voice actors scream into the mic in recording sections (Like Spongebob or Rick and Morty), and I can only guess that they have a special mic for that?

When shopping for a mic, is there a specific name or term in the product that I should be looking for to achieve this?

Or maybe my mic is fine, but I need to adjust some settings in Audition?

Thank you

ryclark · Accepted Answer

Audition just records the digital audio sent to it by whatever audio interface is being used. So any level changes have to be made before the signal gets to Audition. Normally with an external USB audio interface there would be a hardware level adjusting control on the interface. Also some higher end condenser microphones would have an in built attenuator switch to reduce the level in the mic by 10dB for just this eventuality. Unfortunately the Blue Snowball Ice doesn't have a hardware gain control on it to reduce the level. However looking in the mic's user manual it says:

"USING SNOWBALL iCE WITH PC (WINDOWS 7, 8.1, OR 10)

1. Connect to your PC using the provided USB cable.

2. From the Start menu, select the Control Panel.

3. From the Control Panel, select the Sound icon.

4. On the Recording tab, right-click on Blue Snowball iCE and select Properties.

5. Select the Level tab, and select appropriate volume level (start at midway point of the slider & adjust from there)"

Mike Russell · Answer

Adjust the level settings to be much lower for your Blue Snowball Ice as ryclark mentions.

If you're looking to shop for another microphone I'd recommend looking at an XLR mic along with a mic preamp/processor.

You can setup the preamp/processor to compress and hard limit your audio before it hits Audition to prevent the kind of clipping and distortion you're currently experiencing.

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