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I'm in front of small challenge. I'll be recording group of 6 people playing tabletop RPG. They'll be all sitting at one table but game master (person who narrates thru game) will be hidden behind his screen (about 8 in tall).
My plan is to use 6 lavaliere mics but I've never used 6 of them so close to each other in rather small room so I'm worried about working with too much noise while trying to glue it all together. Does my strategy makes sense or would you recommend another solution?
Thanks
Your strategy would be the best idea. You may get some bleed between the mics, but your room acoustics may be an issue. The more you put into deadening the walls with sound insulators, the better the final product. Even if it is a few shelves with books and such on them...it will help with the reverberations.
I heavily advise against using lavalier mics unless the people wearing them have incredible microphone discipline. Especially in a setting in which you are prone to forget the recording situation like a TTRPG session, it's way too likely that people will touch the mics, hair, beards or clothes will scratch them or that cable connections will be interrupted. While you can fix some of that in post production by just cutting the audio whereever there is no dialog, often dialog itself will be impacted aswell.
Instead I would advise a solution like the one that can be seen in the below video, if it's at all feasible for you.
This is a setup for the exact purpose of capturing dialog during TTRPG sessions and mitigates the typical problems of a lavlier mic setup.
Exposed lavs would be better than hidden lavs, as you're managing so many by yourself, if you don't mind them being on camera.
Even better if you can get earset mics (such as Countryman E6 mics), as you'll have to worry less about clothing noise. Plus earset mics have better signal to noise ratio (due to being closer to the mouth than usual lav placements are).
Additionally, with this many wireless, then wireless coordination becomes exceptionally important. FreqFinder and TXAdvance are the main two apps I use myself, but there are many other options (such as Lectrosonics Wireless Designer and Shure Wireless Workbench)
