home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!news.larc.nasa.gov!grissom.larc.nasa.gov!kludge
- From: kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov (Scott Dorsey)
- Newsgroups: rec.audio.pro
- Subject: Re: Bodhran (and other) spot mics
- Date: 31 Dec 1992 13:58:58 GMT
- Organization: NASA Langley Research Center and Reptile Farm
- Lines: 107
- Message-ID: <1huub2INN39g@rave.larc.nasa.gov>
- References: <725764795.5890707@AppleLink.Apple.COM>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: grissom.larc.nasa.gov
-
- In article <725764795.5890707@AppleLink.Apple.COM> JOSEPHSON@AppleLink.Apple.COM (Josephson Engineering,VCA) writes:
- >
- >This is as good as time as any to start a religious war on this newsgroup, and
- >maybe we can all learn a little from it.
-
- Start a religous war? This is a war that has been going on continuously since
- the newsgroup started. We're just throwing a few more bullets into the fray.
-
- >First, some theory that seems always to be lost in this kind of discussion.
- >Sound is a fiction. Mics don't pick up sound, they pick up changes in pressure
- >and/or pressure gradient. Omni mics (Scott's B&K's, for instance) and cardioid
- >mics (Mur's 57) work essentially differently. The omni mic reacts to audio-rate
- >fluctuations in pressure, much as _one ear_ does. Think that's not significant?
-
- Absolutely true. But the microphone to pick is a factor of the recording
- technique you use. He was recommending using an SM57 very closely. I was
- recommending using an omni mike pulled very far back so as to get the
- reflections from the room,
-
- >Now some of my own prejudices. Leave the reverb out. For acoustic music that
- >sounds good in its real space, it's a sure sign of an unsure balance engineer
- >if reverb is needed _at all_, much less "...apply a lot of reverb..." or even
- >"...add some rack/floor tom rock reverb to taste..." I'm assuming one thing
- >here, that the recording venue sounds good live.
-
- Well, if you close mike an instrument like that, you will have to add some
- reverb to prevent it from sounding extremely dry. A much better solution
- is to pull the microphone back into the far field and let the acoustics of
- the room introduce some real reverberation.
-
- If that's not the case, go
- >have a beer and look for a better hall. No amount of reverb will fix a bad
- >natural acoustic unless you close mic things so severely that all the tracks
- >are essentially anechoic. Likewise, if you can't get the balance of near and
- >far field sound and natural reverb on tape to sound as good as it sounded in
- >the hall, reverb won't fix that either.
-
- Unfortunately, a lot of studios (and, from the sound of it, the one used
- by the original poster) are very heavily deadened. This might be a good
- thing for close-miked rock recording, but it's a major problem for doing
- any real acoustic work. Since so much of the recording these days is
- billionmiked rock stuff, finding decent places is fairly difficult.
-
- Prejudice 2, mic it in stereo. Simply
- >panning one mic into _amplitude_ position in a stereo mix ignores the phase and
- >frequency response cues present in the real acoustic. You could elaborately
- >fake it by applying delay and EQ to "correctly" position the mic in the sound
- >field, but again the pickup would then need to be almost anechoic for this to
- >work correctly. Admittedly, the imaging becomes a little more confused if you
- >pan a stereo pair into the overall stereo mix, but the result is often more
- >aesthetically convincing without having to add effects.
-
- This is an excellent idea. The problem is that if you close-mike the
- instrument, you aren't going to get much in the way of good stereo effects.
- Another problem is that when this stuff gets mixed down there is a strange
- urge on the part of many technicians to spread the things wide across
- the soundstage. This results in fifty-mile long pianos wrapped around
- orchestras and the like, and drives me up the wall. So, if you do mike
- in stereo, make sure the guy doing the mix has some clue about him.
-
- >My choice (and this would apply to most spot mic situations where an overall
- >stereo pickup just sounded thin in places) would be a semi-coincident stereo
- >pair of condenser cardioids or figure-eight mics (four to ten inches and 60 to
- >120 degrees apart), about four feet out (not necessarily straight out, see
- >below) from the bodhran head. Again this is assuming that your main stereo
- >pickup is all there, but just thin in spots. Try to get it right in your live
- >2-track mix, but you might want to use more or less of the fill pair when you
- >listen to the multitrack.
-
- Whenever I have done this in the past, I have found that the fill pair
- alone often sounds better than anything else. If God intended you to
- cut it multitrack, He would have given you forty-eight ears.
-
- >Few acoustic groups function well doing overdubs; the
- >audible and extra-sensory interaction that happens live just doesn't get
- >reconstructed in the overdub session unless _all_ of the players are accustomed
- >to it.
-
- This is true... this is why I was suggesting only trying to overdub one
- instrument. I regard overdubs as a cheesy way of getting around bad acoustics,
- but they are sometimes needed.
-
- >Bottom line is, invest some time in experiment before you're ready to roll
- >multitrack. Understand where in the sphere surrounding the instrument the
- >different sounds are. All you really need is one mic amplified and fed to
- >headphones that you wear while walking around. Analyse _with your ears_ what
- >the differences are. Figure out the cause of each difference you hear. Figure
- >out where in the frequency range the instrument-floor-mic and
- >instrument-ceiling-mic bounce nulls are, and how this effects the overall
- >transfer function of instrument to tape. Don't put the mic the same distance
- >from the floor as it is from the ceiling (or walls, or boxes, etc.) And bottom
- >bottom line is, don't look for a magic bullet. I've never found any hard and
- >fast rules that work for every recording. I've seen famed English minimalist
- >recording engineer Tony Faulkner in a session with 20 mics up, and multimondo
- >DGG has made records where all they used was an ORTF pair.
-
- I'll second that.
-
- >Small commercial plug, my company makes good condenser mics of all the general
- >types mentioned above (except the 57!) and I'd be happy to send a catalog to
- >anyone who wants one, e-mail your s-mail address. I also make custom mics for
- >special applications, and nearly all are entirely made in my shop (large and
- >small diaphragm DC-air condenser types, not reworked electrets).
-
- I'll second that too. (David, do you guys make any decent 200V condenser
- mikes with a cardioid or hypercardioid pattern?)
- --scott
-