Microphone Polar Patterns, Explained

A microphone’s polar pattern is the map of which directions it is sensitive to. It is not a sound-quality setting and it does not change what your voice sounds like when you speak straight into the front of the capsule. What it changes is how much of everything else gets in — the room, the keyboard, the fan, the person sitting opposite you. Choosing a pattern is really choosing what you want the microphone to ignore.

That reframing is the useful part, because it turns a technical-sounding spec into a question about your room. If you record one voice in a spare bedroom, you want a pattern that rejects as much as possible. If you clip a mic to someone who turns their head while they talk, you want a pattern that does not care which way they are facing. Those are opposite requirements, and no single pattern serves both.

The four patterns, and what each one hears

Cardioid is heart-shaped: most sensitive at the front, mildly sensitive at the sides, and close to deaf directly behind. It is the default on virtually every podcast, voice-over and streaming microphone because it matches the most common situation there is — one person in front, one noisy room behind. If you only ever use one pattern, this is it.

Supercardioid (and its tighter cousin hypercardioid) narrows the front lobe further, so it rejects more of the room than a cardioid does. The catch is a small rear lobe: it hears a little of what is directly behind it. On a camera-mounted shotgun aimed at a subject, that is an excellent trade, which is why shotgun mics use it. On a desk with a hard wall two feet behind the mic, it can actually perform worse than a plain cardioid.

Omnidirectional is equally sensitive in every direction. That sounds like a flaw and it is also a feature: an omni mic does not change character when the speaker turns their head, and it has no proximity bass boost to manage. That is exactly why nearly every lavalier mic is omnidirectional — a clip-on mic has to survive being six inches from a chin that moves. Omni is also what you want when the room is the recording.

Bidirectional, also called figure-8, hears the front and the back equally and rejects both sides hard. There is one classic use: two people facing each other across a single microphone. It is the most situational of the four, and the reason it appears on multi-pattern desk mics at all.

Stereo is not strictly a polar pattern but appears on the same selector switch. It is two capsules capturing left and right, for music, ambience and ASMR — not for a voice, because a voice recorded in stereo moves around a listener’s headphones in a way that is distracting rather than immersive.

A quick comparison

Off-axis sound: the part nobody mentions

A polar pattern is not a wall. Sound arriving from the side of a cardioid mic is not silenced, it is reduced and altered — high frequencies fall away faster than low ones, so off-axis sound arrives dull and muffled rather than absent. This has two consequences that matter in practice.

First, if you drift off-axis while talking, you do not just get quieter, you get duller, and that is harder to fix in an edit than a volume change. Second, pointing a cardioid mic’s null at a noise source genuinely helps, but the noise that still gets through will sound boxy. Both are arguments for the same thing: work close, stay on-axis, and monitor yourself in headphones so you notice when you have moved.

Proximity effect, and why directional mics sound “radio”

Every directional pattern has a side effect: the closer you get, the more bass it adds. That warm, intimate, broadcast-sounding voice you hear on professionally produced podcasts is largely a cardioid dynamic mic two to four inches from someone’s mouth, with the resulting bass boost dialed back.

Omnidirectional patterns have essentially none of this, which is why a lavalier sounds thinner and more natural than a desk mic at the same distance. Neither is wrong — but if you were hoping a clip-on mic would give you the radio voice, the pattern is the reason it does not.

So which pattern should you buy?

For a single voice in an untreated room, a fixed cardioid is the right answer and a switchable mic is a feature you are paying for and will not use. Switchable patterns earn their money when you genuinely record more than one way — a guest in the room some weeks, a solo read in others. And for a subject in front of a camera, the choice is between a supercardioid shotgun and an omnidirectional lavalier, which is a different decision entirely.

The three microphones below cover those three cases from the registry, with live prices.

Where each pick sits

Blue Yeti — four patterns (cardioid, omni, bidirectional and stereo) selected on the mic, with on-mic gain, mute and headphone monitoring. It is a sensitive condenser, so it hears everything its pattern allows through, which is both why it is a useful teaching tool and why it wants a quiet room.

Shure MV7+ — fixed cardioid, dynamic capsule, USB-C and XLR, with onboard DSP and a real-time denoiser. The argument for it is that one well-implemented cardioid in a dynamic capsule rejects a bad room better than four switchable patterns in a sensitive one.

RODE VideoMic NTG — supercardioid, built as an on-camera shotgun but also a full USB mic with its 3.5mm jack doubling as headphone monitoring. It is the pattern you want aimed at a subject from a camera or a boom arm, with a variable gain dial, high-pass filter, -20dB pad and a safety channel on the body.

How to choose in one minute

One voice, at a desk, in a normal room. Cardioid. Stop reading, buy a cardioid mic, point the front at your mouth and put the back toward whatever is noisiest.

Two people, in person, one microphone. Figure-8, if you have it — or far better, two cardioid mics, one each. Our USB microphone roundup covers both routes.

A subject on camera, a few feet away. Supercardioid on a shotgun mic, or an omnidirectional lavalier clipped to them. Those are the two real answers and our lavalier vs shotgun explainer compares them properly.

A room, a band, an ambience track. Omni or stereo. You want the space, not isolation from it.

And a closing reminder, because it undoes most of what people expect from a pattern: distance beats pattern. A cardioid mic two feet from your face in a hard room will sound worse than an omnidirectional lav clipped six inches from your mouth, every time. Pick the pattern that suits your setup, then get the microphone as close to the sound as the shot allows. That is the whole craft.