A lot of the work I do with big crews usually involves some sort of communication device, a walkie talkie if you will. And obviously you can’t have a PA coming through an open walkie saying, “I can’t find the c-47’s!” on an open set. So what is usually employed with a walkie system is a surveillance mic/ear piece. Observe in the image below:
So what you see there is a microphone with a push button activation and an in ear piece that clips on your shirt collar and wraps around the back of your ear and then sticks in your ear hole. Now for any extended use of said in ear listener, its going to start getting irritating. And to add to that, if you’re wearing headphones, such as I do all day long, they are going to press on that in ear piece even more, making it more irritating. So what I’ve done is THIS:
I cut off that blasted in ear listener and soldered up an 1/8″ male connector that I run into my Nomad. I route it so that it doesn’t go to camera or get recorded. And that annoying in ear piece? well its stashed back in a box in my kit not making me cringe in pain. I plan to eventually solder on a female 1/8″ so that I can connect them back in case I ever need to use it sans sound kit. So now after long days I no longer have that constant inner ear pain combined with producer/crew ramblings/dirty jokes, just the latter coming through my headphones and a feelin good ear hole.
MANGLERMIXER 