This is a little guide on his to speak, sing, rap, kazoo, or do anything into the microphone at live coding events like AlgoRhythms.
The microphones are very sensitive to SPACE. They need to be as close as possible to your mouth / kazoo. Otherwise they won’t work. They can even touch your mouth / kazoo if you want.
Holding the microphone too far away is the most common mistake I see.
When using the microphone, be very very very loud. Don’t be quiet.
If you’re quiet, we’ll need to turn your volume way up and that will cause feedback. This is a bit of brain twister: If you hear your mic causing feedback when you make noise, you might find yourself thinking you need to be more quiet, but that’s not true! In reality, what it means is: You’ve been so quiet that someone else has had to turn up so loud that it’s now causing feedback. And that means we can’t turn you up any louder! It means we’ve hit max volume for you.
Look around you. Where is your nearest speaker? It’s probably not where you thought it was.
Now walk away from it to increase the max volume that someone can put you.
It might sound like the sound is coming from in front of if the room is in front of you so really look around and find the actual nearest speaker and move away.
If you’ve done all these things and you still aren’t loud enough, it’s probably more that you clash with someone else’s sound (pitch / texture / whatever) so go and turn their volume nob down on the mixer.
To find their nob, turn nobs anti-clockwise and see if anything gets quieter. If a nob did nothing, put it back to where it was.
Great! Now you know.