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10-18-2024, 11:56 AM
Hi Guys
One of the microphones Physics refers to is a type that most people will be unfamiliar with. It is essentially a flat surface with a microphone in the middle of the area. There are many reasons for this design to exist, but how well it achieves any of those goals depends on where it is used.
The flat panel makes the mic almost unidirectional as any sound from behind the capsule is blocked. You can mimic this effect simply by placing a conventional mic against a wall, maybe with some damping material to fill in the distance between the front and rear of the microphone body. The pickup may in fact be hemispherical - a half sphere, so something between hard directionality and a cardiod pickup pattern.
The flat panel will block room reflections and other noise from behind the microphone, possibly contributing to a "cleaner" primary sound pickup. This has the potential to make the recording less lively, or less representative of an audience member's experience.
Regarding "band mixes" versus "individual instrument tracks":
The Beatles are a well-known example of a band that played live together very intensely prior to making any recordings. This experience made them very tight musically, and everyone knew the material very well and knew how their equipment worked best. They could go into a studio and play as a band and lay down tracks very quickly and have the mix be as they wanted it to be.
Of course, the first recordings were mono, as that was the style of the era. Radio play was the primary aim, along with selling singles and records to a youthful audience who mostly had mono playback equipment at home. Stereo was not a concern in dance halls.
As recording and playback equipment evolved, so too did the band's financial reach. More studio time could be allotted and more recording tracks on tape combined with stereo mastering lead to more experimentation in the studio. This lead to some interesting results - maybe some songs that could not be played live - and to less beneficial results that smacked of over-indulgence.
The demands made by broadcasters for more compressed mixes slowly crept into what was done in the studio, as we've described above. The modern use of ipods and similar devices has greatly deteriorated the sound quality and there is a whole generation of new music listeners who have never experienced good sound fidelity. Digital is definitely not a panacea except that it allows diverse manipulation of the sound at a core level that was not possible with analog. As described elsewhere in TUTs and here, data compression and data reduction impairs fidelity while allowing more songs to be packed into a given package. To me, that is not a trade-off that I accept.
I always prefer band mixes, but there are also many excellent recordings using multitracking that retain the feel of the band playing together.
One of the microphones Physics refers to is a type that most people will be unfamiliar with. It is essentially a flat surface with a microphone in the middle of the area. There are many reasons for this design to exist, but how well it achieves any of those goals depends on where it is used.
The flat panel makes the mic almost unidirectional as any sound from behind the capsule is blocked. You can mimic this effect simply by placing a conventional mic against a wall, maybe with some damping material to fill in the distance between the front and rear of the microphone body. The pickup may in fact be hemispherical - a half sphere, so something between hard directionality and a cardiod pickup pattern.
The flat panel will block room reflections and other noise from behind the microphone, possibly contributing to a "cleaner" primary sound pickup. This has the potential to make the recording less lively, or less representative of an audience member's experience.
Regarding "band mixes" versus "individual instrument tracks":
The Beatles are a well-known example of a band that played live together very intensely prior to making any recordings. This experience made them very tight musically, and everyone knew the material very well and knew how their equipment worked best. They could go into a studio and play as a band and lay down tracks very quickly and have the mix be as they wanted it to be.
Of course, the first recordings were mono, as that was the style of the era. Radio play was the primary aim, along with selling singles and records to a youthful audience who mostly had mono playback equipment at home. Stereo was not a concern in dance halls.
As recording and playback equipment evolved, so too did the band's financial reach. More studio time could be allotted and more recording tracks on tape combined with stereo mastering lead to more experimentation in the studio. This lead to some interesting results - maybe some songs that could not be played live - and to less beneficial results that smacked of over-indulgence.
The demands made by broadcasters for more compressed mixes slowly crept into what was done in the studio, as we've described above. The modern use of ipods and similar devices has greatly deteriorated the sound quality and there is a whole generation of new music listeners who have never experienced good sound fidelity. Digital is definitely not a panacea except that it allows diverse manipulation of the sound at a core level that was not possible with analog. As described elsewhere in TUTs and here, data compression and data reduction impairs fidelity while allowing more songs to be packed into a given package. To me, that is not a trade-off that I accept.
I always prefer band mixes, but there are also many excellent recordings using multitracking that retain the feel of the band playing together.
