Recording Secrets for the Small Studio by Senior Mike

Author:Senior, Mike
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317999898
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

7.1.4

Mixing Microphone Flavors

Coincident multimiking is tremendously popular amongst professionals who like to mix and match the sonic flavors of different mics on a single instrument, with electric guitar/bass speaker cabinets, snare, and kick frequently receiving this treatment in studios. “There’s an amazing difference in the sound and coloration you get from adjusting the balance of each of the mics,” remarks John Leckie,6 “and you can get radically different textures depending on your mix of [them].” Chris Lord-Alge7 is another fan: “Rather than jamming one mic in front of an amp and grabbing the EQ, a couple of mics will give you better tone without the EQ and all the phase problems you get when cranking up the EQ.” Again, a big advantage of this tactic is speed, because the sound-blending process is so intuitive: If you put up a ribbon mic and an SM57, you immediately have an idea which fader will give you warmth and which presence, and because the two mics are phase-aligned, those two sound characters will combine in a fairly natural way without comb-filtering artifacts. In addition, I’ve found that I get a much better recorded sound using low-budget mics if I combine them like this, rather than using them singly, whereas the quality difference between single-mic and multimic techniques seems less dramatic with more expensive hardware.

Making the most of this technique involves selecting contrasting mics, because that gives you a wider sonic range when you balance them against each other. Mic-pairing maxims from various high-profile engineers bear this out: “cheap”/“expensive” (Stephen Street8), “bright”/“dark” (Steve Albini9), and “good”/“bad” (Jim Scott:10 “Between the two you can find the ideal sound, and you can get brightness and fullness.”). My other tip is to try to get hold of variable high-pass filtering for all the mic channels, because this allows you to moderate the amount of proximity-effect bass boost contributed by each mic, multiplying the number of usable sounds from your mic array without adding much extra operational complexity. In addition, Frank Filipetti11 makes the important point that adding an extra mic to the mix will also make the combined signal louder, biasing your judgment. “[I] make sure that when I take the mic away, my level is still the same,” he says. “That gives me a much truer taste of whether that mix is adding something.”

Although often used for studio recording, multimiking is very rarely used on vocals. This might initially seem surprising, given the amount of time and attention lavished on refining vocal sonics by other means, but there are two good reasons for it. Firstly, because upper-spectrum “air” frequencies above 10 kHz are so important for vocal clarity, the phase-alignment of the microphones would have to be matched extremely accurately to avoid dulling them; and, secondly, any movement of the singer off-axis would subtly affect the phase alignment and introduce more-or-less random variations in the high-frequency timbre. Occasionally, though, you might still consider putting up two mics if you’re recording someone with the projection of an air-raid siren, in order to insure against your first-choice microphone overloading.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.