Our friend Mic.

Hello dear reader, how are things? Today I would like to take some time out and talk about one of my personal favorite things, microphone placement! To me, microphone placement is where it’s at, I would rather spend an entire day working on microphone choice and placement than spend an entire day mixing things that could have already been resolved. Most if not all engineers will tell you that capturing a good sound at the source is one if not the most important thing when tracking live instrumentation. And I couldn’t agree more, and I find that being very meticulous and detailed during this process actually makes mixing more enjoyable as you have more material to deal with, and I don’t know about all of you but for me, more material actually equals less work. But right now I want to get specific.

Lets talk room mics… Room mics are something that I’ve had great success with, but never really fully understood. Providing you have a great room, room mics are fantastic… But often don’t achieve exactly what we intend them to. For me when I use a room mic I want it to act as a real time reverb component in my overall sound. The job of the room mic is to capture reflections within the room and give you a greater sense of space, but often times room mics tend to pick up to much of the direct sound source and really don’t add much to the sound. So to remedy this here’s a great tip I recently picked up. Place two small capsule omnidirectional mics at two different points in the room on the floor. Yep. That’s right I said it, on the floor. By doing so the microphones will be at low enough point in the room to capture ONLY the reflections and natural reflections/vibrations in the room. Give this a shot and let me know what you think by commenting with any questions and concerns! Thanks guys!