Recording Vocals

[danny83]

Do people ever use more than one mic for recording vocals? I got a suggestion to use an overhead mic once. Anybody know if there's any benefit to that?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Riverdog]

Try It...

I think you'll find that using that second mic will give you more room ambience and pronounciation (Spelling??)...

If you record both mics on a separate track, you can take these two different 'sounds' of the same voice and mix them together for a thicker sound...

Just experiment with it and see what you think...

 

[danny83]

Any ideas on the placement of these mics?

 

[Micter]

Watch out for phase cancellation.

 

[Brackish]

Watch out for phase cancellation.

Might the 3:1 rule apply here?

 

[Robert D]

This may be a worthwhile excercise if you are trying to do a natural ambience, no reverb recording. Otherwise, this is unlikely to bring anything to the mix, and may just bring phase problems. What it will certainly do is give you what most recordists are trying to avoid when tracking vocals, room sound.

 

[TexRoadkill]

Overhead mics are great for picking up extra skull resonance.

 

[RAK]

I used a Beta87 and U47 for a session once. They were both close mic'd on the singer but it gave us options, and we could blend the two if wanted also. We ended up mainly using the U47 anyway though. Options are usually good.

 

[littledog]

I've never found it to be worthwhile. But don't take my word for it. Try it once and see if you get anything valuable. If not, at least you got it out of your system and you won't waste any more time on it.

 

[musicstew]

I have never used overhead microphones for recording vocals and don't see any reason to.

I have used two microphones in standard positions on a Singer knowing only one be remain in the final mix.


Each singer sounds different on every microphone, for this reason I have found it useful to use two microphones and then pick the best sounding one later.

A 2 min sound-check doesn't always give the most accurate assessment into the relationship of vocalist to microphone.

 

[littledog]

I have used two microphones in standard positions on a Singer knowing only one be remain in the final mix.


Each singer sounds different on every microphone, for this reason I have found it useful to use two microphones and then pick the best sounding one later.

A 2 min sound-check doesn't always give the most accurate assessment into the relationship of vocalist to microphone.

I can understand that, but I didn't think that is what the original question was. I thought they were asking about using two mics in the mix, which would seem to create more phase issues than anything else, unless one of them was a good distance away and just capturing room ambience, which would probably only be worthwhile in a really nice room.

But using two mics because you can't make up your mind which is better has some validity. I'd hate to take that approach on everything I did, though. I'd end up with sixteen mics on the drum kit alone...