When would you prefer to record with a shotgun mic indoors?

Anytime is a good time for shotgun mics! They’re not only for outdoor film shoots.

Try them instead of your regular large-diaphragm condensers. Perhaps force yourself to use nothing but shotguns for one day. We love them for recording voice-overs at our studios. I personally absolutely LOVE shotguns for voiceover.

We also use them quite a lot for acoustic guitar. They can sound really “fresh” and “clean”. Plus they have the added bonus of a really narrow focus so you can aim them (we prefer the twelfth fret) and they’ll pick up exactly what you want.

But most importantly, shotguns are absolutely imperative when doing any ADR work. It’s basically industry standard to use two mics when recording ADR; 1 lav mic (usually panned to the left channel) and 1 shotgun mic (usually panned to the right). After your long grueling day of ADR sessions, you would send the stereo wav file to the post-pro dept letting them know you used two mics on each channel of the file.

Why 1 lavalier and 1 shotgun for ADR? Simply because that’s most likely what they used on the day of the shoot on location. So using one of each helps the post-pro department tone-match to the original production audio.
Hope this helps!