Category Archives for "Recording"
- in Gear , Microphones , Recording by Bobby Owsinski
4 Good Reasons For Hanging Your Microphone Upside Down
Everyone has seen the photos of the vintage large-diaphragm tube microphone hanging upside down in front of the vocalist like on this famous photo on the left, and while it looks very cool, there really was a method to the madness for placing it like this. It’s not something that’s regularly taught in schools or […]
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Fox To Bury Mics On The Field For The All Star Game
The Major League Baseball All Star Game will have something new this year as Fox plans to expand the field audio coming from the players. This is made possible by a new type of microphone that can actually be buried on the field. The company plans on burying 13 of them on the infield, outfield […]
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Sylvia Massy Explains The Dick Mic
Producer/engineer Sylvia Massy is well-known for creating outside-the-box recording techniques, and one of them is the “Dick Mic.” Essentially it’s a mic positioned in the middle of the drum kit and pointed at the drummer’s crotch. It’s used to fill out the sound of the kit, only it provides a somewhat closer sound than a […]
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Mack On Recording Queen And ELO
With a who’s who list of credits such as Queen, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Rory Gallagher, Sparks, Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, Billy Squire, and Extreme, the producer/engineer who goes simply by the name Mack has made his living making superstars sound great. Having recorded so many big […]
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9 Mics Compared On The Trombone
Many of you reading this may not be recording a trombone anytime soon, but I thought that this comparison of 9 different mics was interesting nonetheless. Paul The Trombonist played into a number of mics that varied greatly in price so you could hear the difference between them. There’s no conclusion on the video about […]
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5 Simple Tips For Miking An Audience
If you’re recording a live performance, then you want to pick up some of the audience to make it sound realistic. Here are some techniques and considerations culled from the latest edition of my Recording Engineer’s Handbook. “Audience recording is both the key and the problem with live recording. It’s sometimes difficult to record the audience […]
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Eddie Kramer On Recording Jimi Hendrix
Engineer/producer Eddie Kramer has a resume that’s a mile long, but the credit that he’s forever tied to is Jimi Hendrix. I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time with him a few yeas ago, and he gave me this great interview for The Recording Engineer’s Handbook. Here’s an excerpt from his […]
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The 8 Constants Of Vocal Recording
By my count, there are 8 “constants” that we find in vocal recording. These are items or situations that almost always prove to be true. Just keeping them in mind can save you a lot of trouble in the search for a sound that works for you and your vocalist. Here are a few tips […]
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Geoff Emerick On Recording The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper
Geoff Emerick is one of the 5 engineers to work with The Beatles and is probably the one most identified with the group. Other than his great book (Here There And Everywhere: My Life Recording The Beatles), you don’t hear him speaking very much about the experience. He goes into great detail in this recent interview for […]
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3 Techniques For Recording Bass Guitar
Just like the acoustic bass (and just about all instruments), a great bass sound is dependent upon the instrument itself, the player, the amp, and the room. The player has to be able to achieve the tone you’re trying to record with his fingers first and foremost. This excerpt from the 4th edition of my […]
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Engineer Neil Dorfsman On Miking A Drum Kit
This is one of the best drum miking walk-throughs I’ve ever seen. In the video below, Neil Dorfsman (Dire Straits, Sting, Paul McCartney, Def Leopard, Bruce Springsteen to name just a few credits) covers how he mikes a drum kit, and he has several unique approaches that I’ve rarely heard before. Actually I’ve heard of most of […]
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3 Ways To Position Your Room Mics
Room mics bring an overall finish to the drum sound and help to glue it all together. In many cases, they’ll fill in the sonic holes in the drum mix and make all the individual drums sound more like a complete drum set. That said, many times they are positioned rather randomly without much thought. […]
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Recording 50s Style
While we live in an period of unlimited DAW tracks, there’s still much fascination with the time where there were far fewer variables, and that means the mono world of the 50s. In that era and the one that immediately followed, mixing held little resemblance to today, since all the magic took place in the recording. Placement […]
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7 Simple Tips For Improving Your Drum Sound
When it comes to a live drum sound during a tracking session, sometimes the smallest details can make a big difference when you consider that there are usually multiple mics involved. Changing one thing can sometimes make a difference, but sometimes it’s the fact that many small adjustments have a cumulative effective on the overall sound. […]
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4 Quick Drum Tuning Tips From The Famous “Drum Doctor”
If you’re doing a session in Los Angeles and you want your drums to instantly sound great, then your first call is to the Drum Doctors to either rent a fantastic sounding kit, or have your kit tuned. Ross Garfield is the Drum Doctor and you’ve heard his drum sounds on platinum recordings from Bruce […]
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