Reversing phase on vocal mic for live use

  • Thread starter Thread starter Uladine
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Uladine

Uladine

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I've heard things about singers who want to use monitors when recording vocals as opposed to headphones, and apparently theres a technique where you reverse the phase on the mic and it supposedly cancels out the monitors or something. Theres more to the technique I'm sure but I can't remember what I read.

Anyway, is there a way to use this technique live with a dynamic mic so that the mic picks up less of the drums and amplifiers and more of just the singer, to where the gain could be turned up further without feedback and without the band coming through the vocal mic?
 
Boy, faking cardiod patterns to extend them? Never thought about that before. They best source you should for is cardiod microphone construction. Find some DIY build your own mics and learn how they create that cardiod pattern, then you can understand how to do it better. I believe you are correct that it involves phase cancelation, and i know you do it on the microphone by turning up the backdiaphragm voltage. If you turn it up to 180 degress it makes a cardiod pattern, and like 230degrees or something makes a figure out. Something close or way off to that ;). But check some of that stuff out and understand how cardiod cancelation works and i bet you could figure out how to do it.

darnold
 
There is a technique which was quite common at one time. What you do is you use two identical mics, with there capsules as close to one another as possible. You invert the polarity (NOT the phase, which is a different thing all together) of one of the mics. It is essential that the singer be as close to one of the mic as is possible, by which I mean lips touching the windscreen. This was one of the most important aspects of the Grateful Dead's famous "Wall of Sound" back in the seventies, which was, at the time, the best sounding live system around. With most dynamic mics it is possible to use a Y-cord to run the mics through one channel, and you just have to wire the Y-cable with one of the connectors polarity reversed.

Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
doh! polarity! dont ask me how i got that one mixed up. heh.

danny
 
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