Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - "Microphone Placement in Live Recording", or , "Stop reading labels and Listen!"

Ted Nightshade · 16th January 2005, 08:17 PM

LISTEN! is always good advice.

I'm pretty damn picky about gear, though, as I have not found very much of it that works very well for the kind of live to 1 or 2 track stuff I do.

But I do very much agree that without a great deal of awareness and care put into placing the sources and the mic(s) within the room, all is for naught. It's distressingly easy to get awful sounds with wonderful gear.

And definitely all this fixing it after the fact is a losing battle. That people are planning to EQ and compress a track before it's even tracked blows my only mind. I could see planning to assess the track and decide if it needs help, but I don't see why it should need help if it's performed and tracked well to begin with.

In my experience, every bit of mixing and processing degrades the sound in a very significant way. Before long, you're compensating for one processor with another processor. Ay-yi-yi! It's too much for me- I just track it flat and right and leave it just like that. Even the super-high-quality mastering processors in great rooms with great monitors and great ears and skills and experience do damage every single time.

I just don't get the whole "enhance" and "excite" paradigms. I can see it if you have to mix or master something that was tracked shabbily, a situation I am grateful not to be in. But every "enhancement" that's made with processing, even the very best simple summing, comes at a steep price sonically. I think you have to be a bit of a geek, you have to have some little detail that seems SO important to you compared to the whole picture, to get into tweaking these things.

But then, hyped sound has become a value of it's own. It sounds "like a real studio!" The kind of place where they can't leave well enough alone.

So for me it's great mic(s), great pre(s), great recorder, and done. Every attempt I make to complicate that bites me on the ass. Of course, the sounds coming off the source need to be great too- the source is the limiting factor. I have to be able to get the source to sound great, or I just can't do a decent job. Whereas, I'm sure the real workin' remote types around here have a million ways to deal with sources "that need help"- the kind we're most likely to encounter, for sure!

16th January 2005, 08:17 PM	#2
Ted Nightshade Lives for gear Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: state of jefferson Posts: 1,328	LISTEN! is always good advice. I'm pretty damn picky about gear, though, as I have not found very much of it that works very well for the kind of live to 1 or 2 track stuff I do. But I do very much agree that without a great deal of awareness and care put into placing the sources and the mic(s) within the room, all is for naught. It's distressingly easy to get awful sounds with wonderful gear. And definitely all this fixing it after the fact is a losing battle. That people are planning to EQ and compress a track before it's even tracked blows my only mind. I could see planning to assess the track and decide if it needs help, but I don't see why it should need help if it's performed and tracked well to begin with. In my experience, every bit of mixing and processing degrades the sound in a very significant way. Before long, you're compensating for one processor with another processor. Ay-yi-yi! It's too much for me- I just track it flat and right and leave it just like that. Even the super-high-quality mastering processors in great rooms with great monitors and great ears and skills and experience do damage every single time. I just don't get the whole "enhance" and "excite" paradigms. I can see it if you have to mix or master something that was tracked shabbily, a situation I am grateful not to be in. But every "enhancement" that's made with processing, even the very best simple summing, comes at a steep price sonically. I think you have to be a bit of a geek, you have to have some little detail that seems SO important to you compared to the whole picture, to get into tweaking these things. But then, hyped sound has become a value of it's own. It sounds "like a real studio!" The kind of place where they can't leave well enough alone. So for me it's great mic(s), great pre(s), great recorder, and done. Every attempt I make to complicate that bites me on the ass. Of course, the sounds coming off the source need to be great too- the source is the limiting factor. I have to be able to get the source to sound great, or I just can't do a decent job. Whereas, I'm sure the real workin' remote types around here have a million ways to deal with sources "that need help"- the kind we're most likely to encounter, for sure!