multitrack? or better two track?

[Greg]

To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques, and have tracked and mixed
a lot of music, including one demo CD for a professional poet, and a
professionally produced CD for a small rock band -- hat tip to David
Glasser at Air Show Mastering.

When I asked Dave what I could have done to make his job easier, he
said "less ambience".

So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
degree of realism I am capturing now?

I need to move from "you are there" realism to "they are here"
realism. So:

Better acoustic treatment for less initial ambiance?

Better microphone technique?

Multitrack microphone technique?

Better control of dynamics during mixing?

Better use of digital delay and reverberation during mixing?

?

[Bob Cain]

Greg wrote:

> To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
> mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques, and have tracked and mixed
> a lot of music, including one demo CD for a professional poet, and a
> professionally produced CD for a small rock band -- hat tip to David
> Glasser at Air Show Mastering.
>
> When I asked Dave what I could have done to make his job easier, he
> said "less ambience".
>
> So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
> degree of realism I am capturing now?

One thing you can try, even with what you've already done,
is to take the original recordings back from stereo to
mid/side and rematrix back to stereo with a reduced side
component. This will narrow it somewhat and reduce ambience.

Waves makes a plug that simplifies this process and gives
you a graphical view of what you are doing called "S1 Stereo
Imager". It is also a very effective panner for mid/side
and can play with what is called "Blumlein shuffling" which
is a bass management function.

This plug works about as effectively with XY stereo
recordings too.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein

[Arny Krueger]

"Greg" > wrote in message
m
> To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
> mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques, and have tracked and mixed
> a lot of music, including one demo CD for a professional poet, and a
> professionally produced CD for a small rock band -- hat tip to David
> Glasser at Air Show Mastering.

> When I asked Dave what I could have done to make his job easier, he
> said "less ambience".

> So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
> degree of realism I am capturing now?

> I need to move from "you are there" realism to "they are here"
> realism. So:

> Better acoustic treatment for less initial ambiance?

> Better microphone technique?

> Multitrack microphone technique?

> Better control of dynamics during mixing?

> Better use of digital delay and reverberation during mixing?

I'm sure you've thought about doing something with "spot" mics.

Basically, my mic technique is to layer spot mics on top of a 2-channel
spaced-omni recording. I find that this gives me the option at mixdown time
(Adobe Audition) to vary the sonic perspective from "You are there" to "They
are here" to "They are in your face".

I often produce two mixes, one I call "vocalist friendly" (VF) which is a
more distant perspective, the other I call "vocalist critical" (VC) which
has a lot more of that "they are here" perspective. These mixes "work"
better or worse in various listening environments. For example, a VF mix
works well on a good home stereo or on a portable listening device. A VC mix
works much better in a car.

The room has a RT of about 4 seconds. So, I don't need any added reverb, I
just have to control what I've got. Two fairly nasty slap echoes give me a
challenging gauntlet to run.

Because the singers and instruments are spread over a 25 x 35 x 25 cube,
there are appreciable delays in the various mic feeds.. I've found that I
can get some interesting and useful effects by moving the mic feeds around
temporally when I mix down.This is easy enough to do in Audition by editing
block properties.

Incidental noises have allowed me to pretty well verify where the mic's are,
spatially. The laws of physics do rule! ;-)

One effective trick involves delaying vocal tracks by about 50 mSec to
position them on top of the slap from the ceiling over the platform. This
gives a mild "chorus" effect and changes the slap from a full-time liability
into an asset of sorts.

A VF mix makes the voices sound more blended and acceptable no matter how
messy the actual singing is. A VC mix sounds like a bad joke and is pretty
painful to listen to unless the vocalists are really on their toes. The
people I record mostly don't practice much, so I don't circulate a lot of VC
mixes. I get a few soloists who do have their act together, and the VC mixes
of them performing can be pretty emotionally involving.

Another trick involves dual-micing the grand piano. I have a PZM mic inside
the piano and a wide cardiod under the far end of the sounding board. The
second location was chosen to be maximally different-sounding from the
first. The PZM is used for the stage monitors. These two mics give two
vastly different sets of colorations. Both are dry. The two pickups are so
phase-coherent that I have to invert one because it is on the other side of
the sounding board from the other. I can mix, match and equalize to paint a
wider variety of piano sounds than the fairly mediocre tone that is in the
room.

I feel like right now I'm set from a production standpoint, so now I'm
working on the quality of the artists. The whole point of the exercise is to
get better sound quality in the room, where I also mix the SR. The recording
is pure mic feeds taken from the console insert points. Listening to these
recordings has justified things like mic upgrades and eq for the room in
certain feeds. It also helped me debug some intermittent distortion that
turned out to be due to some shorted wiring in the monitor feeds. The
recordings are mostly tools I use to understand and tune the technical work
that manifests itself in real time. But a few of the recordings I've made
have given a lot of pleasure. Perhaps when I get the musicians up to speed
I'll have something for the comp.

[Mike Rivers]

In article > writes:

> To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
> mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques

> So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
> degree of realism I am capturing now?

Move the mic closer to the source. Or record in a room that's not so
large or live.

> Better control of dynamics during mixing?

When you "mix" your 2-track recording, what are you doing? This might
be what's wrong with your recordings.

> Better use of digital delay and reverberation during mixing?

If your problem is that your recordings sound like there is too much
ambience, "better use" of delay and reverberation would be "less use"
or maybe "no use."




--
I'm really Mike Rivers - )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

[Scott Dorsey]

Greg > wrote:
>To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
>mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques, and have tracked and mixed
>a lot of music, including one demo CD for a professional poet, and a
>professionally produced CD for a small rock band -- hat tip to David
>Glasser at Air Show Mastering.
>
>When I asked Dave what I could have done to make his job easier, he
>said "less ambience".
>
>So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
>degree of realism I am capturing now?

Get the mikes in closer. Use a room that has less ambience. Try using
near-coincident miking with tighter microphones (or M-S with a tighter
center mike).

For rock stuff, you might want to mix spot mikes with your overall ambient
microphones, at least for vocals if nothing else.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Greg]

Bob Cain > wrote in message >...
> Greg wrote:
>
> > To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
> > mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques, and have tracked and mixed
> > a lot of music, including one demo CD for a professional poet, and a
> > professionally produced CD for a small rock band -- hat tip to David
> > Glasser at Air Show Mastering.
> >
> > When I asked Dave what I could have done to make his job easier, he
> > said "less ambience".
> >
> > So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
> > degree of realism I am capturing now?
>
> One thing you can try, even with what you've already done,
> is to take the original recordings back from stereo to
> mid/side and rematrix back to stereo with a reduced side
> component. This will narrow it somewhat and reduce ambience.

That was what Dave did during mastering. It was a tradeoff between
enough stereo and not too much ambience.

> Waves makes a plug that simplifies this process and gives
> you a graphical view of what you are doing called "S1 Stereo
> Imager". It is also a very effective panner for mid/side
> and can play with what is called "Blumlein shuffling" which
> is a bass management function.
>
> This plug works about as effectively with XY stereo
> recordings too.

I'll have to check it out, thanks.

[Greg]

(Mike Rivers) wrote in message news:<znr1078918581k@trad>...
> In article > writes:
>
> > To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
> > mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques
>
> > So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
> > degree of realism I am capturing now?
>
> Move the mic closer to the source. Or record in a room that's not so
> large or live.

I've recently added some adjustable absorbers to the room, so that may
help.

> > Better control of dynamics during mixing?
>
> When you "mix" your 2-track recording, what are you doing? This might
> be what's wrong with your recordings.
>
> > Better use of digital delay and reverberation during mixing?
>
> If your problem is that your recordings sound like there is too much
> ambience, "better use" of delay and reverberation would be "less use"
> or maybe "no use."

In one case I recorded the vocalist separately from the band, working
fairly close to the microphones, and used just a bit of compression
and delay on the vocal tracks in mixing. To my ears it was just too
dry otherwise, given the neo-rockabilly sound of the band, but perhaps
there are other approaches that would have worked. I left any further
compression to the better-equipped and far more skillful mastering
engineer.

[Greg]

"Arny Krueger" > wrote in message >...
> "Greg" > wrote in message
> m
> > To date, I've been recording exclusively direct-to-stereo. I've used
> > mainly spaced omni and mid-side techniques, and have tracked and mixed
> > a lot of music, including one demo CD for a professional poet, and a
> > professionally produced CD for a small rock band -- hat tip to David
> > Glasser at Air Show Mastering.
>
> > When I asked Dave what I could have done to make his job easier, he
> > said "less ambience".
>
> > So how to get less ambience on my next project without losing the
> > degree of realism I am capturing now?
>
> > I need to move from "you are there" realism to "they are here"
> > realism. So:
>
> > Better acoustic treatment for less initial ambiance?
>
> > Better microphone technique?
>
> > Multitrack microphone technique?
>
> > Better control of dynamics during mixing?
>
> > Better use of digital delay and reverberation during mixing?
>
> I'm sure you've thought about doing something with "spot" mics.

Yep. Right now I have only two channels of A/D, but am looking at
getting eight channels of Metric Halo.

> Basically, my mic technique is to layer spot mics on top of a 2-channel
> spaced-omni recording. I find that this gives me the option at mixdown time
> (Adobe Audition) to vary the sonic perspective from "You are there" to "They
> are here" to "They are in your face".

Thanks for the detailed rundown -- there are some good ideas for me to
try. But it sounds like you need to tame the echos in your room?

I recall seeing something on this group a few years back about
measuring the distance from the room mics to each spot mic, and
setting up a corresponding pair of delays for each spot mic to align
it with the room mics.

[Arny Krueger]

"Greg" > wrote in message
om
> "Arny Krueger" > wrote in message
> >...

>> I'm sure you've thought about doing something with "spot" mics.

> Yep. Right now I have only two channels of A/D, but am looking at
> getting eight channels of Metric Halo.

Lucky you!

>> Basically, my mic technique is to layer spot mics on top of a
>> 2-channel spaced-omni recording. I find that this gives me the
>> option at mixdown time (Adobe Audition) to vary the sonic
>> perspective from "You are there" to "They are here" to "They are in
>> your face".

> Thanks for the detailed rundown -- there are some good ideas for me to
> try. But it sounds like you need to tame the echoes in your room?

no foolin!!!!!!!!!!!!

;-)


> I recall seeing something on this group a few years back about
> measuring the distance from the room mics to each spot mic, and
> setting up a corresponding pair of delays for each spot mic to align
> it with the room mics.

Based on what I see in my multitrack recordings, that should work. However,
in my case the dominant sounds from the platform seem to go to the ceiling
before the room mics pick them up. I believe this is because the room mics,
which do dual-duty as choir mics, are pointed into the junction of the back
wall and the floor, and there is some kind of corner-reflector focusing
thing going on that gives acoustic gain. It's wild to look at the feeds from
the vocal mics, and watch some isolated loud impulsive noise from one side
or the other work its way down them.

If you've got a good sounding room, then so much the better. I don't, but am
struggling bravely against it. They haven't quite yet approved my 6-figure
budget for the room enhancements, so I've got to do what I can
electronically in the mean time. And I do mean that it is a "mean time".