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afromoose 1 February 2008

Recording a three piece instrumental band with 2 mics

Hi everyone

I play in this band:

http://www.myspace.com/ashowka

and we're looking to do some recordings of new material.

We've got new practice room with a nice acoustic and have some basic recording gear that we want to use to record demos. There's a recording on our myspace site (You and Me) which used two mics, which was recorded live in a venue - not exactly ideal and we set up the mics quite haphazardly.

We'd like to use the two mic technique because we're quite a jazzy band and we want to pick up all the range in our sound - including the kit, which we'd like to have an open sound.

Question is:

we're using two CAD M179s - does anybody know the best way to set these up for a stereo recording? We're just recording bass, drums, guitar.

we've also got at our disposal a RODE nt1a in case it would be useful. The mics are going into a Korg d3200

Thanks!

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Comments

BobRogers Sat, 02/02/2008 - 05:44

Since you have a pair of multipattern mics, you have a lot of options available to you. There is a lot of detailed information out there on the web, so I won't try to repeat it here. You should search the web for

Stereo recording techniques
Stereo microphone techniques

You can search the web or this forum for the following two mic techniques
XY
M/S or MS or Mid/Side
Blumlein
ORTF
AB

I would recommend that you try [="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORTF_stereo_technique"]ORTF[/]="http://en.wikipedia…"]ORTF[/] first - You put the mics 17 cm apart at a 110 degree angle from each other. I like [[url=http://="http://en.wikipedia…"]Blumlein[/]="http://en.wikipedia…"]Blumlein[/] for solo instruments, but it might also work well for a trio. Anyway try them all. Moving mics around is free. (Though you will probably want to get a stereo bar, which is not.)

bent Sat, 02/02/2008 - 06:57

Giving credit where credit is due, Moonbaby posted a good site for you to check out:

[="http://homepage.ntlworld.com/chris.burmajster/index.htm"]Innocent Ear[/]="http://homepage.ntl…"]Innocent Ear[/]

Check out the links on the left, good pics and descriptions of various stereo techniques.
They also have a good article on the Loudness War.
Check it out!

[[url=http://="http://recording.or…"]Originally Posted Here.[/]="http://recording.or…"]Originally Posted Here.[/]

Codemonkey Sat, 02/02/2008 - 11:13

Their ORTF/Blumlein/MS descriptions are pretty good too.
Only thing I don't like is how it complains about how engineers have gone from recording at 44kHz, to 48 and 96 and 192, when most people can't hear above 20KHz. Total information mismatch if ever there was one.
Oh, and they blame engineers wanting to play with toys for ruining the way music sounds these days.

But if you want to learn what the heck M/S micing is, by all means go there.

moonbaby Mon, 02/04/2008 - 05:29

Codemonkey wrote: Their ORTF/Blumlein/MS descriptions are pretty good too.
Only thing I don't like is how it complains about how engineers have gone from recording at 44kHz, to 48 and 96 and 192, when most people can't hear above 20KHz. Total information mismatch if ever there was one.
Oh, and they blame engineers wanting to play with toys for ruining the way music sounds these days.

But if you want to learn what the heck M/S micing is, by all means go there.

What was stated on the Innocent Ear site was that there is still the "boys with their toys" syndrome. This was regarding over-compressing and EQ'ing modern recordings of classical and jazz material (primarily). Recordings that are being played back on equipment that can easily handle much wider dynamic ranges.
I would dare say that if you polled the professional mastering engineers out there, you'd get a ver similar response.

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