trick for phase aligning stereo mics

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foreverain4

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works great for getting bass drum and snare drum in the center of the image. set up the mics, have the drummer strike the drum recording only the overheads into a DAW. zoom way in and see what is going on. rinse and repeat (move mics) till you have them aligned. pretty simple, just thought i would share. i do the same thing with room mics....



also, works well if you are doing a stereo spread on acoustic guitar. just have the player "tap" the guitar to get a single transient.....
 
When I want to align 2 mics I reverse the polarity on one and move it till it sounds awful. Then you flip the polarity back to normal:)
 
xstatic said:
When I want to align 2 mics I reverse the polarity on one and move it till it sounds awful. Then you flip the polarity back to normal:)
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you cant really do this for OH left and right. i do this to line the OH up with the snare drum, but i am talking about just the 2 OH with each other, not with the snare. seems like if you "slip" one or the other after the fact, you will have a slight delay.....



i was more or less offering this as an alternative to using a string or something to make sure the OH mics are equal distance..
 
The whole measure your overheads thing is kind of a myth. In the end you do what is right. Actually, what I described works great for placing any pair of mics and trying to get an accurate phase relationship with them. I should have expounded. Set your first mic up, run it to the headphones panned center. Then set the second mic up, and reverse its polarity. Pan it center also and put it in the headphones at about the same level as the first mic. Move the second mic around until it is still in the vicinity of where you would like to place it, but sounds horrid. Leave it there and reverse the polarity once again so it is back at nominal. Now you have a spaced pair that are not fighting with each other too much. Keep in mind that with overhead mics you will NEVER get them perfectly in phase if spacing them. X-Y methods can certainly get you close you though. Part of the sound of a kit though is the way it interacts in space and time between its different parts. The only bad phasing is the phasing that sounds bad, not just the phasing that happens to be there.

When I suggested this, in no way did I mean that your way would not work. I merely wanted to add another little trick to help readers.
 
I recently had a conversation with a particularly skilled ex-Nashville engineer friend and he was telling me of a guitar recording technique he used. He would put pink noise through the guitar amp, and flip the farther away mic of the two out of phase. He pulls that mic out until he can make the vast majority of pink dissapear, and then flips it back in phase. He says it sounds incredible and hardly any eq is needed. Then again, nevermind the fact that his mics are all top notch and he's probably running all of them through $2000 worth of preamp.
 
foreverain4 said:
zoom way in and see what is going on. rinse and repeat (move mics) till you have them aligned.
Click to expand...


Why not just move the wave forms? Lazy man's approach.
 
chessrock said:
Why not just move the wave forms? Lazy man's approach.
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cuz, if you move one overhead to align with the other, then your cymbals, which are closer to the OH's, are moved out of time. i think that it is important that the snare transient arrives at both overheads at the same time in real time. like i said, i DO take BOTH OH's and align them with the snare mic...
 
foreverain4 said:
cuz, if you move one overhead to align with the other, then your cymbals, which are closer to the OH's, are moved out of time. i think that it is important that the snare transient arrives at both overheads at the same time in real time. like i said, i DO take BOTH OH's and align them with the snare mic...
Click to expand...

Yea, but you can do the same thing with the wave forms. Granted, it might throw a few of the other things a little off ... but then, so does moving the mics. Unless you're doing a perfect XY, in which case there is basically no point fretting over phase anyway.
 
The problem is that phasing occurs at different frequencies at different places and times. Moving the overhead tracks is a good way to try and salvage a track that already has a problem. Getting the mics right form the get go is a much better way of getting a proper track down. There are many different methods for doing this. So far I have seen a couple of good ones in this thread. I do think it is important to teach people how to get it right before you hit record though and not to rely on the ease of digital editing after the fact. When I am doing overheads the most important thing is that the cymbals don't get phased and swishy sounding. I can certainly understand the snare being important, but I also keep two additionla mics on the snare and have NEVER had a problem with the snare phasing with the overheads. I always check every cymbal to make sure that it doesn't get swishy and that phasing doesn't make the stereo image jump around between the two overheads. Thats one of my drum pet peeves. I have heard too many recordings where this has happened and it makes the overheads sound like they were tracked as low quality mp3's.

One other problem (especially with overheads) is that when you just nudge a track one way or the other it is kind of like moving a mic forwards or back wards. You can't really nudge a track to simulate a left and right movement.
 
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