mic technique

[AviZiv]

Hi Simon,

I own a couple of your Alchemy sounds sets and am very interested in your sound design techniques. Can you please shed some light on the usage of 3 mics (instead of one) for sample recording? You mention it on your web site. I am curious how and why you use such an arrangement and if this lends itself to particular processing later on in Alchemy.

Thanks for all the great work
Avi

[Sampleconstruct]

Hi Simon,

I own a couple of your Alchemy sounds sets and am very interested in your sound design techniques. Can you please shed some light on the usage of 3 mics (instead of one) for sample recording? You mention it on your web site. I am curious how and why you use such an arrangement and if this lends itself to particular processing later on in Alchemy.

Thanks for all the great work
Avi

Sorry, I totally missed this thread somehow...

I mainly use a Neumann U87 as the center mic and a stereo pair of Neumann KM 184 for the sides. I found when doing mixes for cinema that L-C-R recordings would work great for the L-C-R setup in 5.1 Dolby and adapted that teqnique for all my acoustic sample recordings, as one can always have a more or less wide stereo field without loosing the center aspect.

Depending on the source material I will position the stereo mics a bit further away from the source so that the small delay between center mic and sides adds to the depth of the sound. Sometimes with more percussive sources I will bring in the sides a bit so that the transients don't cause peaks on the sides, or I will use M/S compression for only compressing the centre and leaving the sides uncompressed which drastically broadens the stereo field.

I'm very happy with the sounds I'm getting out of this and could not imagine going back to a setup with 2 mics for normal stereo or a mono recording, although when recording instruments like brass and woodwinds in the studio I do use mono recordings as well, but for dry samples a bit or a lot of natural room and stereo space adds to the quality of the sounds imo.

[AviZiv]

Thanks for the insight, Simon. Most interesting!

Cheers,
Avi