phase and stereo image help

  • Thread starter Thread starter bluedaffy
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No, I line them up so that the peaks are all going the same direction. Then I use my ears to tell me that it sounds way better than just flipping polarity. My snare mic is being mic'ed from the top, just like my overheads. Nothing's "pumping" in the other direction. If I had a bottom snare mic, that might be an issue, but I don't.
 
RAMI said:
No, I line them up so that the peaks are all going the same direction. Then I use my ears to tell me that it sounds way better than just flipping polarity. My snare mic is being mic'ed from the top, just like my overheads. Nothing's "pumping" in the other direction. If I had a bottom snare mic, that might be an issue, but I don't.
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But the OP sounds like he's got an issue where one mic is pushing while the other is pulling, AND he's talking about two overhead mics, not an OH and a close mic. So how does this help?
 
ashcat_lt said:
So how does this help?
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I don't know man. Maybe we should go back and we'll see that I mentioned what I do, you responded to it by telling me it only works "if......etc....", and I responded that, and so on and so forth. By that time, I wasn't trying to help the OP, I was having a conversation with you about why what I do works for me.
 
OP. Pan the overheads apart, solo them and listen.
Flip polarity of one and do it again.

One will sound natural and the other wont.
If it's not apparent, zoom in as far as you can and find an obvious transient.
Make sure left and right waveforms are moving in the same direction.

If they're not you need to flip polarity of one side. This means one of your cables or mics or whatever's in the path is wired with 1+2 reversed. Ie, opposite polarity to the other channel.


As I said earlier, phase is a time/distance thing. It's also relative to a certain frequency. It's not really relevant to this discussion.
The only thing you can flip is polarity, regardless of what your preamp/interface/software says.

I know how picky that sounds but, in a conversation like this where phase and polarity are being discussed, it needs to be known.
 
Farview said:
True, but my point was that the 3 to 1 rule has nothing to do with stereo mic techniques.
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Yeah, that's what I meant earlier but Jim and I were talking about two different things.
A stereo image exists because of phase differences.
The only things in phase between the two mics are the things place at equal distance from both mics.

Typically that's the snare.
 
After reading the suggestions from you guys, I am almost 100% certain that one of the cables must have been wired wrong. When I zoom in on the overhead tracks the transient attack waves travel inverse to one another. So now I should flip the polarity on the one that travels opposite the rest of the kit. I used only overheads, kick and top snare mixing so they should presumably all be relative to each other with regard to pushing first, am I correct on this?

I now fear that in all the zooming in and messing around with stuff that I didn't move one of the overheads out of time with the other in hopes of remedying the situation. I'll have to look in the studio one manual to see if there is any 'super' undo function that will take me back to the original state of the files... if not I'm sure I can get it close, is just that the waveform on this song's left overhead track is kind of tricky to decipher, I think it's the sound of the hi hat that that is visually clouding the wave from having a more distinct looking shape (like one I would expect to see from a snare drum strike).

Oh, and for those of you asking about the overhead mic placement, they were behind and to the sides of the drummer and about, oh, I don't know 3 feet above the kit, left mic pointed roughly about where the snare and crash meet on a typical setup, and right pointed roughly about where the mid tom and the ride cymbal meet on a typical 5 piece setup. I apologize, I am not yet familiar with the terminology of drum mic placements.
 
bluedaffy said:
After reading the suggestions from you guys, I am almost 100% certain that one of the cables must have been wired wrong. When I zoom in on the overhead tracks the transient attack waves travel inverse to one another. So now I should flip the polarity on the one that travels opposite the rest of the kit. I used only overheads, kick and top snare mixing so they should presumably all be relative to each other with regard to pushing first, am I correct on this?
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This is just a preference thing.

I usually have all mics that are above the kit working together. Tom mics, snare mics, overheads etc.
If they're pointing downwards then I group them.

Jim (and others) have talked about having the polarity flipped on both overheads with reference to snare/tom mics.
Because of the distance between OHS and close mics, certain frequencies will be 180 degrees out of phase even with the mic polarities matched, so try it both ways and see what you like.


bluedaffy said:
I now fear that in all the zooming in and messing around with stuff that I didn't move one of the overheads out of time with the other in hopes of remedying the situation. I'll have to look in the studio one manual to see if there is any 'super' undo function that will take me back to the original state of the files...
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All the separate tracks will have identical start points, since they were all recorded at the same time. ;)
 
All you have to do is line up the start point of all the drum tracks to bring them back in line. This is super easy if you started the recording at the beginning of the session. There may also be a "move to origin" command somewhere in your daw.
 
So dumb, why didn't I think of that! I forgot that even though I trimmed the audio off before the song starts that it always remembers the full track if I stretch the file back out. Embarrassing.
 
bluedaffy said:
So dumb, why didn't I think of that! I forgot that even though I trimmed the audio off before the song starts that it always remembers the full track if I stretch the file back out. Embarrassing.
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Well, not really. I don't think that's what Farview was saying.

If you moved a track at some point during mixing, stretching it to the beginning might not help you. It has to stop stretching when it gets stretched to 0:00, but it doesn't mean that's the actual beginning of the track.
 
Let's throw some more basics in here.
Even if you couldn't get back so what. There's nothing necessarily special about 'original placement. (There's better or 'worse mic positions in reference to before you hit R, that's not what I mean :p :)

Pick a transient from a spot in the kit that when aligned to.. might be complementary to the effort. How about the snare

Now if the mics were time aligned to it to begin with.. You're back to where you were.
If they weren't you've centered (Haas effect) the kit to the snare, and some of the phase tones (which are different anyway from different points all over the kit) ..shifted a bit in the top end.
 
I'm not sure how other DAWs work but in mine (studio one pro) even if you slice or split a track and delete one of the regions, you can still drag the remaining region out and the track info is still there. So if I dragged it all the way out as far as it will go to the beginning and the recorded data stops before 0:00 on the timeline (and I never start recordings at 0:00) that should be exactly when the track started to be recorded.

Good point mixsit, just for reference sake I would like to see what the original tracks look/sound like. When I set up and place the mics and give them a listen I move them around a bit to my liking so even if the sound can improve by shifting things I like to hear what I heard and liked originally.
 
Yeah I was thinking too if you zoom vertical on the waveform you could likely see where the actual audio came in ('on..
Here's another thought. They all stopped at the same point too. Did you slip edit the tails?
 
bluedaffy said:
I the recorded data stops before 0:00 on the timeline (and I never start recordings at 0:00) that should be exactly when the track started to be recorded.
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Yeah, you're right. If it stops before 0:00, you're ok. What I was getting at was, let's say you had moved a track backwards (or forward in time, to be more precise), then it would have stopped at 0:00 and you wouldn't have known if that's really the beginning of the track. Anyway, never mind. I was over-analizing it. Glad that worked for you. Now re-read Mixsit's post. :D
 
bluedaffy said:
So if I dragged it all the way out as far as it will go to the beginning and the recorded data stops before 0:00 on the timeline (and I never start recordings at 0:00) that should be exactly when the track started to be recorded.
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It all depends where you start to record a track from.
Best bet is to always record ALL tracks....from the start of the timeline. Often the time shown is 00:00:00, but could be whatever you set it at. I usually start most of my projects with a 1:00:00:00 time (because I work with tape, and other stuff, and need a longer preroll before 00:00:00: to lock everything)....but the time still begins at the start of my DAW timeline...never anywhere deeper in.
If you do that....then you can slice up a track and move parts around all day long...and you can always get back to the exact same starting position if needed.

Some guys will do that for some tracks....but then for smaller parts, they punch-in wherever they need them. Well, that's OK to do....BUT....once you move those smaller parts around, you will not be able to just expand them back to their exact original position (unless you made note of it), since they didn't begin at the start of the timeline.
Yeah...you save some disk space by not recording the entire track for a small/short bit of music...but you then have to be careful when moving.
Also...if you ever needed to transfer tracks to some other DAW....by having them always start at the very beginning of the timeling....you can drop those tracks in any DAW, push them back to the start of the timeline, and they will always stay in perfect sync. If you have small/shirt parts...you have to know where they are supposed to go, or spend a bunch of time moving them around until you find their best position.
 
Good point, I never thought of it that way. As a rebuttal however I would say that even though I have always made it a point to not start recording at 00:00:00, all the tracks on the drum kit started at the same time obviously when I pressed the record button, So I could shift, wiggle, nudge, and juggle those tracks all day and at the end of it I would still be able to line them up just how they used to be if I were so inclined to do so. Also, I haven't yet run into any reason why I would have to shift an entire track other than one of the drum tracks, so those wouldn't be an issue in that sense.

Having said that, you make a good argument miroslav, and you have very much forced me to re-think the issue of when to start a recording on the timeline, especially the transferring of tracks to another DAW. I've learned so much on this forum and I've only been part of it for like 3 weeks! Thanks
 
Is nuendo and cubase the only DAWs that have a 'move to origin' function?

The stretch out to the beginning fo the timeline trick doesn't work for me because I have Nuendo set up to record 10 seconds before I actually hit the record button.
 
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