How to Record Vocal with stereo Miking technique

GautamRoy

New member
I have encountered the stereo miking technique yesterday. I just wanted to know how we can implement stereo miking technique in vocal recordings? Is it helpful to increase the depth of vocal?
 
Stereo = 2 different signals, how a human hears with an ear on each side of the head. Voice - one signal. Do you mean binaural recording (basically 2 mics set as if they were the 2 ears of a person's head?You could use 2 microphones with different characteristics, equally spaced from the singer's mouth and each will translate the (same) sound its own way. Not really stereo, but two slightly different signals.
If you have a really good tracking room you can put one mic close to the singer and another further back in the room - this was how most of David Bowie's vocals were tracked. Again, not stereo, but 2 distictly different sounds - but then he had a distinct voice, too.
 
Instruments (and voices come in the same category) They have a range of widths. Voices, trumpets, trombones etc have a very, very narrow width. All their output bar a small amount comes from one location - They are in effect, mono sources. You can argue that in a singer, some of the sound comes through the body, usually the chest and throat (which it does), and brass instruments do produce small amounts of energy through the metal - but it's very, very small compared to the primary source. The widest instrument would be something like a church pipe organ - where the width can be huge. Even a grand piano can have a sound source that can be five or six feet wide. Other instruments have multiple sections, or holes, or extended vibrating bits that mean what comes from one side is different to the other.

If you wish to record the instrument then in a dead space, where you want as much instrument and as little room as possible in the mic's output then a voice is pointless recording with a stereo technique, unless you want the effect of the singer moving their head, for weirdness. The grand piano, on the other hand loses something without being recorded in stereo.

So for me - a voice is a point source and gets ONE mic. Head turns in stereo can sound amazingly weird, but it's an effect, not a sensible technique. If you use two mics, then they'll hear exactly the same thing, and there is a chance that you'll start to get nasty comb filtering because the source is very close to a point.
 
If you wish to record the instrument then in a dead space, where you want as much instrument and as little room as possible in the mic's output then a voice is pointless recording with a stereo technique

The corollary of course is that if you're recording the singer (or instrumentalist) in a live space -- and you genuinely want to capture some of that room tone -- then stereo mic'ing is absolutely the proper way to achieve that. I've done a few vocal sessions with a coincident stereo pair (usually M/S or Blumlein, I think I've done X/Y once) where the singer was out in the middle of the big live room specifically because we (duh) wanted them to sound like they were singing in a big live room.

But yeah, in a dead space or for "normal" [sic] vocals stereo mic'ing is pointless.
 
I think you are wasting your time, 1 mouth = mono, also the vocal needs to be focused where by if it was a single source guitar you may want it to spread. If you want the vocal to have more depth stereo is not the way to go.

Alan.
 
I think you are wasting your time, 1 mouth = mono, also the vocal needs to be focused where by if it was a single source guitar you may want it to spread. If you want the vocal to have more depth stereo is not the way to go.

Alan.

Pretty much agree. If you were recording the late Pavarotti at La Scala you WOULD use a stereo mic to capture "the whole thing" (but note on the TV progg' The Three Tenors there were only 3 "spot mics"? Well back as well!).

As for "depth"? A term greatly beloved of speaker reviewers but there is actually no mechanism to produce depth in the smoke and mirrors world of stereo! (which of course means "solid" nowt to do with "two")

Mind you, if you have a really mobile sax player say it is likely that a co-I pair will resolve the gyrations AS image movement whereas a single mic will give level and timbre changes you can't see.

Dave.
 
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