Room Mics And Phase Tricks With Vance Powell

There are two parts to recording that many engineers are either super concerned with or completely oblivious to and that’s placement of the room mics when tracking and phase. In my experience, phase is something that you have to be aware of, but sometimes spending gobs of time on trying to get things just right don’t get you much further than your first educated guess. In this video, producer/engineer Vance Powell tackles both subjects in a practical easy-to-understand fashion.

Vance has a ton of credits like Jack White, The White Stripes, Martina McBride, Chris Stapleton, The Arctic Monkeys, and many more, and he’s won 6 Grammy’s for his efforts. He also owns a very cool studio (Sputnik Sound) in Nashville that’s been his base of operations for a number of years.

That said, in this video Vance covers the phase relationship of various mics when you’re tracking a session. He especially takes the time to explain how he sets up his room mics, and shows a couple of cool guitar tricks that are worth considering as well.

The video is sponsored by Universal Audio, and features mics from Royer Labs and Mojave Audio (you can see Mojave’s Dusty Wakeman throughout).

You might also want to check out Vance Powell on my Inner Circle Podcast #166 where he goes into details on many of the things covered in the video and more.