AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - Best way to mike for room ambience in surround

wrote:

I want to record the ambience of a room in surround (for a
5.1 system)
and was wondering about the best mike setup for that. Are
there any
standard techniques?

Ambience is a musical sound like many others.

For obvious reasons, close-micing is probably not going to
be overly sucessful with ambience. ;-)

OTOH, PZMs can work for ambience. Been there, done that and
I should probably do it more.

I've also used spaced omnis, spaced cardioids, X-Y cardioids
and X-Y hypercardiods.

The spaced mic approaches get you the expected phasy sort of
sound, while the coincident techniques provide more focus.

Now, if the idea of well-focussed ambience of gives you a
headache... ;-)

Scott seems to me to be to be making a good point - and that
is when it comes to micing ambience, a lot of people myself
included are sort of shooting in the dark. I'm currently
making recordings with two pairs of spaced omnis and a pair
of X-Y broad cardioids (6 mics) on 6 tracks...

Different music seems to *want* different kinds of
spatiality. My preference is to leave as many decisions as
close to the finished product as possible. In my economy
performances are one-time occurance and highly valuable,
while mixing time is negotiable.