The Polar Pattern Visualiser

A polar pattern describes how sensitive a microphone is to sound arriving from different directions. It's a map of pickup vs rejection. Omnidirectional mics pick up equally from all directions. Cardioid mics favour the front and reject the rear. Figure-8 mics pick up front and rear equally but reject the sides completely.

Understanding your mic's polar pattern helps you control what gets recorded and what gets rejected - which is arguably more important than any plugin you'll ever use.

They're all variations on front-focused pickup with rear rejection, but the details matter. Cardioid has its null (maximum rejection) directly behind the mic at 180°. Super-cardioid has tighter side rejection but introduces a small rear lobe, with nulls at roughly 125°. Hyper-cardioid goes even tighter with a larger rear lobe and nulls around 110°.

The critical takeaway: with super and hyper-cardioid, the rear of the mic is not where maximum rejection happens. You need to point the null angles at whatever you want to reject, not the back of the mic.

Omni is your go-to when the room sounds good and you want to capture it. Orchestral sessions, choir recording, solo acoustic instruments in a nice space - omni gives you the most natural, uncoloured sound because it has the flattest frequency response of any pattern and zero proximity effect.

The trade-off is obvious: no rejection. If you need isolation between sources, omni won't help. But if isolation isn't the priority and the room is part of the sound you want, omni is often the better choice. It's not "worse" than cardioid - it's a different tool.

Figure-8 (bidirectional) picks up equally from front and rear with complete nulls at the sides - 90° and 270°. It's the natural pattern of all ribbon microphones (Royer R-121, AEA R84, Coles 4038). It's essential for Mid-Side (M/S) stereo recording, where the side mic must be figure-8.

It's also used in Blumlein stereo technique and for recording two sources facing each other (like a vocal duet with one mic between them). The side nulls are incredibly powerful for rejection - they're the strongest nulls of any pattern.

That's the proximity effect - a bass boost that increases as the sound source moves closer to any directional microphone. The tighter the polar pattern, the stronger the effect: figure-8 has the most, cardioid has moderate, and omnidirectional has none.

It's physics, not a flaw. Radio DJs use it intentionally for that deep, full voice. If you don't want it, either back off the mic or use a high-pass filter to clean up the low end.

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of microphone technique. Your mic's polar pattern changes with frequency. At low frequencies, the wavelengths are so long they wrap around the diaphragm, and every directional mic starts behaving more like an omni.

Use the frequency slider in the tool above to see this in action - drag it down to 200 Hz and watch even a cardioid pattern open up dramatically. This is why low-frequency bleed from kick drums and bass amps leaks into everything, regardless of your polar pattern. It's also why high-pass filtering is essential in almost every mix.

Absolutely - arguably more so than in a professional studio. Home studios typically have worse acoustics, more background noise, and less isolation. Understanding your mic's polar pattern helps you position it to reject room reflections, computer fan noise, or sound from other parts of the house.

Even if your mic only has one pattern (most budget condensers are fixed cardioid), knowing where the rejection is strongest means you can point that rejection at whatever you want to minimise. It costs nothing to use your mic more effectively.