Lg diaphragm mics, group recording & bleed

O

OldCopper

New member
A lot of bluegrass types have moved to using an AT4033 (or similar) mic for performances, with the entire ensemble gathering around the single mic. I've had the opportunity to do this a few times and love it. So I want one of these mics for my own PA set up.

I see that these mics are supposed to be pretty great for recording. My question is if I'm recording a band in a home studio situation how can I use one or more of these mics if I'm recording a group playing all at once (vocals and instruments) but want to seperate the tracks? In PA applications the value of this type of mic is it picks up everything within 4 feet of it. So dosen't that mean all the tracks will bleed over each other? I don't have anything like booths to seperate the players. Do I have to lay down tracks one at a time to use this type of mic? Thanks!!!
 
I recently recorded a bluegrass band and I used condenser mics. Just use cardiod or hyper cardiod patterns and spread everybody out. A little bit of cross talk actually helps you IMHO in situations like this, as long as the cross talk isn't too far out of phase or all kinds of bad things will start to happen (comb filtering). I used a GT AM-52 on stand up bass, SM-81s on guitar and mandolin and (it worked) a SM-57 on banjo. Experiment.
 
Yes everything will bleed all over the place,but it sounds to me that that's exactly what the folks you mentioned are going for,isn't it? You get certain unique harmonics and phase stuff happening when it's all picked up by one source and it does have a lot of appeal for some types of music.It's how all music was recorded for a long time,before stereo.
 
Yo Old Copper:

Do all the music first...then, do the vocal stuff. Over-dubbing is easy and works well in home studios. Trying to do the whole she-bang at once.....sounds like an engineering nightmare on 12th avenue, especially in a home studio.
Green Hornet

[This message has been edited by Ben Mocini (edited 07-04-2000).]
 
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