You find a microphone that looks perfect for your podcast. Then you open the specifications and see something like:
Polar pattern: Cardioid
Or maybe it says omnidirectional, bidirectional, supercardioid, or hypercardioid. If you’re new to microphones, those words don’t tell you much.
Does cardioid sound better? Is omnidirectional better for podcasting? And what does any of this have to do with recording your voice?
A microphone’s polar pattern is actually pretty simple once you understand what it’s describing. More importantly, choosing the right pattern can make a noticeable difference to your recording.
Here’s what microphone polar patterns are, how the common patterns work, and which one you should use for podcasting.
What Is a Microphone Polar Pattern?
A microphone’s polar pattern describes how sensitive the microphone is to sound coming from different directions.
In simple terms, it tells you where the microphone listens. Some microphones mainly capture sound directly in front of them. Others capture sound from every direction. Some are designed to hear the front and back while rejecting sound from the sides.
Imagine placing a microphone in the middle of a room. Someone talks directly in front of it. Another person talks behind it. Someone else talks from the side. Will all three voices be recorded at the same level?
That depends partly on the microphone’s polar pattern.
This is why understanding polar patterns is useful. You aren’t simply choosing what you want the microphone to hear. You’re also deciding what you want it to ignore.
Why Is It Called a Polar Pattern?
Microphone manufacturers often show polar patterns using circular diagrams. Imagine looking down at a microphone from above.
The microphone sits in the center of the diagram, while a line around it shows how sensitive it is to sounds arriving from different angles.
Some diagrams look roughly like circles. Others look like hearts or figure eights. These diagrams are called polar plots, and they’re where the term “polar pattern” comes from.
You don’t need to become an audio engineer and memorize every diagram. For most podcasters, understanding a few common patterns is enough.
Cardioid Polar Pattern
Cardioid is probably the polar pattern you’ll encounter most often when shopping for a podcast microphone. The word comes from the heart-like shape of its polar diagram.
A cardioid microphone is most sensitive to sounds coming from the front. It captures less sound from the sides and rejects much of the sound coming from directly behind it.
Imagine you’re recording a podcast at your desk. Your mouth is in front of the microphone. Your computer is behind it. A cardioid microphone can focus primarily on your voice while reducing some of the sound coming from behind the microphone.
That’s extremely useful. It doesn’t mean background noise magically disappears. Your room still matters.
But directional pickup can help you get a cleaner recording. This is one reason cardioid microphones are so common in podcasting, streaming, vocals, and voice recording.
Why Cardioid Works Well for Podcasting
Most podcasters don’t want to record everything happening in the room. They want to record one person. If you’re sitting directly in front of your microphone, cardioid makes a lot of sense.
Your voice is coming from the area where the microphone is most sensitive. Other sounds can be reduced depending on where they’re coming from.
This also works well for multi-person podcasts. Instead of putting one microphone in the middle of a table and asking four people to talk toward it, you can give each person their own cardioid microphone.
Each microphone primarily captures the person sitting in front of it. That gives you much more control when editing.
If one host coughs while another is talking, having separate microphones and tracks can make the problem easier to fix.
Omnidirectional Polar Pattern
An omnidirectional microphone captures sound from all directions. “Omni” basically means all.
Instead of concentrating heavily on the front, an omnidirectional microphone is designed to respond more evenly to sounds arriving from around it.
At first, that might sound perfect. Why wouldn’t you want a microphone that can hear everything? Sometimes you do.
Imagine you’re recording several people sitting around a table using one microphone.
An omnidirectional pattern can make sense because people are speaking from different directions. It can also be useful for capturing the natural sound of a room or environment.
But there’s a downside. The microphone hears more of what’s happening around it.
That can include traffic, air conditioning, computer fans, room reflections, and other unwanted sounds.
For a solo podcaster recording in an untreated bedroom, omnidirectional usually isn’t my first choice.
Bidirectional or Figure-8 Polar Pattern
A bidirectional microphone captures sound primarily from the front and back while rejecting more sound from the sides.
Look at its polar diagram and you’ll understand its other name:
Figure-8.
The sensitivity pattern looks roughly like the number eight. This can be useful for face-to-face interviews.
Imagine two people sitting across a table. The microphone sits between them. One person talks into the front. The other talks into the back. The sides of the microphone are less sensitive. It’s a clever setup.
However, there are limitations. Recording two people onto one microphone gives you less control than recording each person separately.
If one person is much louder than the other, balancing them can be harder.
For serious podcast production, I’d generally prefer giving each speaker their own microphone and track when possible.
Still, figure-8 is useful to understand and can be valuable in certain recording situations.
Supercardioid Polar Pattern
Supercardioid is similar to cardioid but more directional. It has a narrower area of sensitivity toward the front.
This can help focus the microphone more tightly on the sound source. But there’s an interesting tradeoff. A supercardioid microphone generally has some sensitivity directly behind it.
That means microphone placement becomes important. You might assume the worst place for unwanted noise is directly behind the microphone because that’s often true with cardioid.
With supercardioid, that isn’t necessarily the case.
Supercardioid microphones can be useful in situations where you want stronger directionality and better rejection of sounds coming from certain angles.
They’re common in live sound, film production, and other environments where isolating a sound source is important.
Hypercardioid Polar Pattern
Hypercardioid takes the directional idea even further. Its main front pickup area is narrower than a standard cardioid pattern.
Like supercardioid, however, it also has a rear pickup area. That makes positioning even more important. A highly directional microphone isn’t automatically better.
If you move around a lot while talking, a narrower pickup pattern can actually make your recording less consistent.
Lean too far away from the microphone’s sensitive area and your voice can become noticeably quieter. This is why microphone choice should always match the way you’re actually going to use it.
Shotgun Microphone Patterns
You’ve probably seen those long microphones used on film sets. Those are shotgun microphones.
Shotgun mics typically use an interference-tube design to achieve strong directionality, often combined with a lobar-type pickup response.
The goal is to focus strongly on sound coming from the direction the microphone is pointed while reducing sound arriving from other directions.
This makes them useful when you can’t place a microphone directly in front of someone’s mouth.
For example, you probably don’t want a giant podcast microphone sitting in front of an actor’s face during a movie.
A shotgun microphone can be positioned outside the camera frame and aimed toward the actor.
Shotgun microphones are also used for video production, interviews, documentaries, and location recording.
They’re not usually the first microphone I’d recommend for a traditional desk-based podcast, but they can be very useful for video production.
Multi-Pattern Microphones
Here’s where things become interesting. Some microphones aren’t limited to one polar pattern.
A multi-pattern microphone may let you switch between cardioid, omnidirectional, bidirectional, and sometimes other modes. This gives you flexibility.
Recording yourself?
Use cardioid.
Recording people around a table?
Try omnidirectional.
Recording two people sitting opposite each other?
Figure-8 might work.
This is particularly common with certain condenser microphones. Some USB microphones also provide multiple pickup-pattern settings. Just remember that having more patterns doesn’t automatically make a microphone better.
If you’re only recording yourself, you might use cardioid 99% of the time. Don’t pay for features you don’t actually need.
Polar Pattern vs. Microphone Type
It’s easy to confuse a microphone’s polar pattern with its type. They’re different things.
Terms such as dynamic and condenser describe how a microphone converts sound into an electrical signal.
Terms such as cardioid and omnidirectional describe its directional sensitivity.
So you can have a cardioid dynamic microphone. You can also have a cardioid condenser microphone. The words describe different characteristics.
For example, many popular podcast microphones are dynamic cardioid microphones because that combination works well for close-up spoken-word recording.
Does a Cardioid Microphone Block Background Noise?
Not completely. This is a common misunderstanding. A cardioid microphone isn’t an automatic noise-removal system. If your dog is barking loudly behind you, the microphone may still hear it.
If construction workers are drilling outside your window, they’re probably going to make it into the recording.
Polar patterns reduce sensitivity from certain directions. They don’t create silence. Microphone distance matters too.
If your mouth is close to the microphone, your voice will be strong relative to sounds farther away.
That’s one reason getting close to a microphone can help produce cleaner podcast recordings. The room, microphone placement, recording level, and polar pattern all work together.
Position Your Microphone Correctly
A polar pattern is only useful if you know which part of your microphone is the front.
This sounds obvious. It isn’t always. Some microphones are end-address microphones. You speak into the end.
Others are side-address microphones. You speak toward the side.
Beginners sometimes buy a side-address microphone and speak into the top because it looks like that’s where their voice should go. Then they wonder why the recording sounds terrible.
Check the manufacturer’s instructions. Find the microphone’s active side. Then position it correctly.
Which Polar Pattern Is Best for Podcasting?
For most traditional podcast setups, cardioid is the easiest recommendation. If you’re recording one person per microphone, cardioid gives you a useful balance between capturing the speaker and rejecting sound from other directions.
That’s why you’ll find it on so many podcast microphones. Omnidirectional can make sense when you intentionally want to capture sound from around the microphone.
Bidirectional can work for face-to-face conversations. Supercardioid and hypercardioid are useful when you need more focused directionality.
There isn’t one pattern that’s best for every recording. The right choice depends on what you’re trying to capture.
Final Thoughts
A microphone’s polar pattern describes how sensitive it is to sounds coming from different directions. Cardioid primarily captures sound from the front. Omnidirectional captures sound from around the microphone. Bidirectional captures the front and back while reducing pickup from the sides. Supercardioid and hypercardioid provide narrower front pickup with some rear sensitivity.
Understanding these differences can help you choose the right microphone and position it properly.
For most beginner podcasters, you don’t need to overcomplicate things.
A cardioid microphone placed close to your mouth in a reasonably quiet room is a great place to start. Then concentrate on microphone technique and your recording environment.
Because choosing the right polar pattern helps—but where you put the microphone and what happens in front of it still matter just as much.