MadMax said:
I know it's been beat to death, but why doesn't anybody ever talk about distance or room micing? When I'm playing thru my Marshall, the sound I hear and love is at my ears, not right on the grill of tha cab. Why not stereo mic at exactly my listening position?
Or is the issue one of not capturing the sound of the solo amp, but one that will sit well in a mix?
Well ideally, thats what we want to happen. For whatever we hear to come out exactly on tape. Except it gets complex, because our hearing mechanism is complex and mics can't do an absolute perfect job of recreating how we hear sounds.
The closest thing to "lifelike" listening is the binural head, which uses a dummy head with high grade mics inside the ears. You can walk around it and it feels like it's really happening around you. Even then, the binural head can't really replicate the fluids in our head and the fact that we have shoulders which affect our listening.
Some people actually position that in front of the drum as overheads or ambient mics and they get really good sounds.
Other than that, it's really in the different patterns you can use in tracking. Your X/Ys and spread pairs. Then your T-Tree set up, really good for just capturing a solid lifelike stereo image from one general location (orchestral). The list goes on.
But really what it turns into is a matter of accepting the realities and physics of the tracking/mixing process. Some people may find better results by DIing everything and then completely adding ambience artifically later on.
Others might have an awesome room to track in and utilize the room as an effect itself. I honestly prefer the later method, just that it becomes really hard to find a good space to do that in. Cause it is forgotten that the room is a major part of the equation. Shitty rooms mean shitty depection of depth and ambience.
Plus, as a means of getting contrast in mixing, it helps to know that DIing stuff will have a different color/feel/presence than a miced cab. You might want that at some point (whether something will stick out or stay recessed in the mix)
And let's face it, a good track/mix engineer is measured by the time based FX (including the room) he has and how he uses it. Or at least one of the major factors I should say.
But really it can be done at the home. A simple way is to use to good mics (that you feel are good to do this). Say like take a LDC and put it on the grill to your liking. Then perhaps take your other LDC and position it somewhere in the room distant to that mic. If you think about it, that mic is sorta acting like a lifelike "superduper convolution reverb" plugin. So instead of adjusting parameters on a plug-in, you're doing that through mic placement, mic selection, room treatment, the gear you use to record with and whatever else your imagination can think of.
At that point, spend all the hours you have to in search of the perfect setup for that room. Position mics farther or closer, angle then, twist them...whatever you feel will get the sound. Mark it with tape if you have to.
Then mixing wise you treat that as two seperate tracks. For example, maybe you'd have your dry track panned hard right with the ambience in the middle. Then you can decide how much of the wet to dry you want by using your faders.
That's how alot of the engineers I've met have done it. They took the time (hours to days) to find what they felt was the absolute best setup for something, then remembered it for next time. From that point on, total setup time can't be more than 30minutes, since you already spent that time in the beggining to see what works and what dosn't.
Just some food for thought.
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But I must say I'm kind of excited to try combining a room mic and a close mic with my strat and my mesa DC-2 and see what I can come up with.
