Games with 2 mics

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dres

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Here's an interesting effect I discovered when playing with 2 NT1's a few weeks ago. It's an effect that might be interesting to some...

Set up two identical mics on stands next to each other so that the stands are near vertical and you can easily grab one with your hand. Run both through your desk/preamp with the gains matched and set monitor them through your headphones. Reverse the phase of one mic and talk/sing into the mics. If you don't have a phase reversal switch you could make a special mic lead to do the job. The effect ?

Not surprisingly if your in the right place the two mics cancel and your voice pritty much disappears. All you hear is reflections from your room, interesting ? there's more... Now grab one of the mic stands and move it slowly backwards and forwards... the sound of your voice reappears and different positions cancel different frequencies giving a kind of phased effect.

I find the NT1's are pritty silibant and using this technique you can effectively kill the offending frequencies.... the resulting sound isn't natural but for the right song could be just the thing.

Now the positioning is fairly crucial so your singer would have to be pritty diciplined however for more effect you could get them to be creative and move one of the mic stands in time with the music.

The effect would also work for mismatched mics with subtle variations in the cancellation effect.

I'm sure it's been done before (Harvey ?) It's experimental stuff but good fun.
 
Sounds more like...

Games after two bowls and a few beers:D
 
Done before?

Correct, this is almost identical to the old Grateful Dead trick (Anyone remember them?).

Due to the amount of stacks on stage, the whole sound would bleed into the vocals mic making the singing hard to hear. One of their techs (must have been the sound guy) came up with the idea of making a Y cable with the polarity reversed on one of the connectors, connecting two identical mics and placing them on a stereo stand. Singing into one mic which picks up vocals and stage sound, while the other mic just picks up the stage sound. You can never completely eliminate the stage sound from the vocal mic but there's a lot of reduction.

I do a lot of outside broadcasting for TV companies which include reporting and interviews (a guy's gotta eat!) and I tried this technique a while back - who's the smartest sound tech in Germany?

Regards,

John
 
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