That conflates creation and recreation of an auditory event. All bets are off with multimic content since the 'correct' final product is the producer's vision. Recreation requires capture of not just the amplitude but the direction and timing of the sounds reaching a listener at the original event. The Rode NT1 modified J-disk posted earlier is at best a coarse first cut. Even so it can generate huge, coherent sound fields I never experience with classic two mic techniques.
That's the one. It's only an example of the very wide range of experimental pseudo HRTF arrays designed by nature recordists. More details and representative clips on this particular version designed by John Hartog is linked below. On my system the 'robin' recording expands well beyond the listening room boundaries in every direction behind the speakers but except for vertically. Hartog has many more examples on Bandcamp.
http://rockscallop.org/how/barrier10.html
Back to topic, for me speakers will never sound more realistic until source material allows it.
http://rockscallop.org/how/barrier10.html
Back to topic, for me speakers will never sound more realistic until source material allows it.
You never heared a good drummer then, because a good drummer balances his drumset himself. And a good drummer can be recorded with one mic and still sound decent. I did do quiet a few recordings in the past and very often used the Glyn John technique for this, but other ways also exist and work well when used right. Mostly i used 4 mics at most for genres where it was fit. A kick mic and snare mic are mostly handy to have, but 90% or more of the sound comes from room mics. Maybe for heavy metal that can be not enough, but many styles can be recorded with minimal mics on the drum, if the recording space is sounding good and the drummer is good enough to balance himself. It gives a better natural sounding kit than close mic everything. It's not as easy to do it right as close micing everything altough.I'm sorry to say - but that's mainly cause you have no idea how recording and mixing is working.
You probably never heared a natural drumset from 3m distance. You will never hear this sound on a record and also never on stage live. No way.
Cause it's - lame. It doesn't sound anything as you are used to what it should sound! The Kick is silent and has no power at all (the first thing you mic on a drumset, even more important as the overheads in small rooms). Toms are to silent. Snares to thin. Cymbals often way to lound (depends if the drummer really knows what he is doing ;-)). And everything comes just from one point - so it overlays and get's washed.
I have rehearse today - should I post a short soundfile?
So - you record a drumset from close. Similar to what you hear when directly standing in front of it or what the drummer hears at the drumseat. At this position the drumset is BIG, sometimes even around you. It uses the whole spectrum from left to right of imaging. So you use a stereo microphone and get a wide image of the drumkit - which sounds cool and separates the instruments to hear them better.
You need to strengthen the shells. You need a signal without room sound and low bleed from the other drums (a drumset is a set of many instruments which are often quite different in their behaviour)! So you have to come close with your microphones. The shells don't sound anything as they should and you need to modify (eq) the signal. Then you have to listen where the shell you want to reinforce sits in the stereo mix from the overheads and put your close mic there with panning - otherwise you will hear 2 locations for a drum and everything get's confused. And when you are careful you even delay the close mic so timing fits to the received sound in the overheads.
Of course you have bleed between the instruments and microphones of the drumset. For some drums (kick, snare) you even use more then 1 microphone to get the whole spectrum of the drum. You use spot mics for cymbals which are not loud enough or very important and need to be clearly heard. You use room mics to get the impression of - room. Often 2-3 sets of room mics for different purposes.
So you end up with 10-24 microphones for the drumset. And when everything is done perfectly right (which is not that easy as this supershort summary maybe gives a hint) people say "Wow, that's a good and natural soundig drumset". It's sound is completely designed during recording. Cause nobody wants to hear a natural drumset.
You know the drumsound of Metallica St. Anger? A very brave project - cause the drumsound was kept unusal natural. Still with plenty of mics but closer to what an amplified drumset would sound in a rehearsal room. You know the reactions of the fans?
There are mic techniques with less microphones like "Glyn Johns technique" with 3-4 microphones what they used in times of the Beatles. With a great set and room this can sound cool too - but is in no means natural! The stereo panorama you get is far from a real drumset, kickdrum of course enforced. Floor tom is amplified to much. It's always a compromise ...
p.s.: I didn't write about the most important things - a good drummer, a great tuned instrument and a perfect recording room is of course needed to start with
Here we go again... another Dave Rat video trying to reinvent the wheel. I really dislike this man's philosophy of how sound is emanated from individual instruments. The FR and temporal balance of sound coming from a separate sound source (ie acoustic guitar, piano, drums, etc) is infintely and variably different listened to from EVERY TINY MINUTE ANGLE.
You can't just build an underdampened, resonating PVC contraption of mismatched speakers that scatter sound everywhere. Bose started this BS nonsense and ever since we've been plagued with so many other countless similar attempts to do the same thing. It will NEVER EVER be capable of emanating sound the exact same way a real unplugged acoustical instrument does, especially something as complex as a full size grand piano. At least the Vifa NE149W on top of his awful contraption is the best speaker he used, yet he stuck it in the most insignificant position of his "franken-array". Its just a bunch of nonsense.
Seriously, this sort of sound radiation philosophy examination needs to be put to bed, specifically in the way its being approached, which is highly flawed to start with. It doesn't help that this guy's hyper eclectic nonsense is being spread like wildfire on the internet and I have to question alot of his freaky philosophies towards audio reproduction in general. They all usually don't hold any water when it comes to what has already been successfully accomplished with higher end approaches. In this specific example, I refer to proven micing methods (Jeklin disk, ORTF, Blumlein, etc) to recreate an accurate stereo recording which would definitely be convincing, to the point of acoustically placing the listener in the same live musical event he/she would have perceived with very own ears that took place in the exact location. The only thing which would be missing was the tactile feeling of lower mids on downward through the body, which could be replaced with a subwoofer at close proximity reproducing the correct FR spectrum - not difficult to do.
We hear with two ears in our head which can be convincingly replicated with stunning accuracy through micing techniques which already exist as mentioned before. They do all have their own individual slight shortcomings, but they do a highly sufficient job of capturing a live performance of virtually any instrument in its live environment, separately or together as a band at the listeners location - what you would hear being physically present at a live performance. Putting a bunch of speakers in front of someone which radiate the individual acoustic source in an inaccurate manner causes more problems than it's fixing. Its shear nonsense.
To put it simply, the sound source isn't the issue. Its the way its being captured and preserved which is potentially flawed. I've heard countless convincing binaural recordings which sound very accurate when reproduced over a higher end setup, even through a simple set of decent fulrange drivers with matching quality subs set up in a somewhat correct manner.
Sorry, nonsense like this just pollutes the world with unnecessary philosophies which don't make much sense, unless you are trying to place a bunch of mannequins on a stage and make them sound like a virtual cover band of sorts. Kraftwerk comes to mind...
You can't just build an underdampened, resonating PVC contraption of mismatched speakers that scatter sound everywhere. Bose started this BS nonsense and ever since we've been plagued with so many other countless similar attempts to do the same thing. It will NEVER EVER be capable of emanating sound the exact same way a real unplugged acoustical instrument does, especially something as complex as a full size grand piano. At least the Vifa NE149W on top of his awful contraption is the best speaker he used, yet he stuck it in the most insignificant position of his "franken-array". Its just a bunch of nonsense.
Seriously, this sort of sound radiation philosophy examination needs to be put to bed, specifically in the way its being approached, which is highly flawed to start with. It doesn't help that this guy's hyper eclectic nonsense is being spread like wildfire on the internet and I have to question alot of his freaky philosophies towards audio reproduction in general. They all usually don't hold any water when it comes to what has already been successfully accomplished with higher end approaches. In this specific example, I refer to proven micing methods (Jeklin disk, ORTF, Blumlein, etc) to recreate an accurate stereo recording which would definitely be convincing, to the point of acoustically placing the listener in the same live musical event he/she would have perceived with very own ears that took place in the exact location. The only thing which would be missing was the tactile feeling of lower mids on downward through the body, which could be replaced with a subwoofer at close proximity reproducing the correct FR spectrum - not difficult to do.
We hear with two ears in our head which can be convincingly replicated with stunning accuracy through micing techniques which already exist as mentioned before. They do all have their own individual slight shortcomings, but they do a highly sufficient job of capturing a live performance of virtually any instrument in its live environment, separately or together as a band at the listeners location - what you would hear being physically present at a live performance. Putting a bunch of speakers in front of someone which radiate the individual acoustic source in an inaccurate manner causes more problems than it's fixing. Its shear nonsense.
To put it simply, the sound source isn't the issue. Its the way its being captured and preserved which is potentially flawed. I've heard countless convincing binaural recordings which sound very accurate when reproduced over a higher end setup, even through a simple set of decent fulrange drivers with matching quality subs set up in a somewhat correct manner.
Sorry, nonsense like this just pollutes the world with unnecessary philosophies which don't make much sense, unless you are trying to place a bunch of mannequins on a stage and make them sound like a virtual cover band of sorts. Kraftwerk comes to mind...
I had the luck to work with some INCREDIBLE drummers and percussionists. And yes, they are very much aware of their sound and can adapt to many situations on the fly.
But as I wrote - even the "simple" mic techniques don't reproduce the natural, unamplified sound of the drumkit. In both videos the floor tom was over pronaunced - which sounds cool and I also love to do that (I even have an effect tom in my setup, similar mixed as a gong drum). The bass drum sound in the band. Listen to the snare close mic. This can sound great if it fits the music - still not the natural sound of the kit without amplification (that was the original point. You can show that with many instruments, I just chose drums).
With more dense and complex music you need a different sound of the drums (Rick talked about this). Not just Metal - Pop, Rock, whatever is dense produced or with overdriven guitar, ther is not much space in the spectrum to cut through.
I did a lot of live shows with huge drumsets and complex, modern music in different styles. Just found a clip from Aaron in Budapest. These live cut's from the TV stations are never what you heard in the room (they get a stereo sum from the live mixer and maybe some room mics) but it gives an impression. Glyn John technique is not for everything ;-)
Here is another show we did with this group. I had 40 microphones on the stage and needed to balance these different instruments and still try to get them sound natural. This doesn't work with a few mics, when the west african djembe starts you won't ear anything else on the stage
A long time ago, my former girlfriend had her drum kit in the living room. No recorded drums ever sounded like real drums for the reasons you describe.
Drums were nice sounding but way too loud for the living room. Of the musical jaundras, jazz recordings seem to do the best job of capturing drum sounds at least somewhat naturally.
Ed
The third video starts with in camera sound ... and only later they used the live mixer sound (whis is also far from perfect as you have to adapt to different levels from the natural sound from the stage + room reverb/sound + EQ correction for the PA). It's more "punchy" as it sounds in the room, for this music it's more important that you can hear all the phrases and details as that you get a "round, fat" sound.
It's just a quick & dirty recording from the live video the video guys did anways (there was a mixture of live+modified and recorded video snipets).
I was mostly hired from the musicians directly - which gives the best possibilities to work cause we could tweak parts so it sounded for the audience as the musicians wantet to. (e.g. you somtimes need different(weaker) mallets with close mic's to get less attack as you need with natural sound. Or harder ones when a lot of stuff is going on and I need more attack to cut through)
It's a pitty the musicians never wanted to make a proper DVD from this material, both where great shows!
But back to topic - it's interesting how we imagine some instruments "natural sound" and how they really sound.
With some it's pretty the same, some are quite different.
And very often we like the "bigger then life" sound more as a real, realistic sound.
In a mix it's often neccesary to realy do wild and strange stuff to some instruments - but it works when everything is playing together. Sometimes instruments (guitars, synths) are just here to add some colour or "texture" to the song or fill some spectral part to get "more". I hope your producers knew what they demanded, it needs some tactfulness to get that right.
And yes, I would also say smaller jazz combos are the best way to keep a natural sound of the instruments. These musicians are incredible (we had a good jazz university in the town I studied sound engineering and there where always interesting projects to do) and they bring their instruments to the limits, use the whole dynamic range. You need a more original sound to be able to translate and capture this. And they care about their sound.
When you have drums, bass and sax you have 3 instruments in pretty different parts of the spectrum - a lot of space for every instrument to let them shine. Just throw in a distortet guitar ...
A quote from a quote. I have heard a drum set up close, I even played on one in on instance back in '86. Great experience. I cannot remember how it sounded, neither can I remember my most recent up close drum listening experience, however these were played over amplifiers.
However it is true that I have little idea how recording and mixing is done. Thanks for the videos.
Taking my impression of the first recording, I like the balanced sound of the mix very much. The sound, however, sounds duller than what I want to hear on a recording, with the tinsel effects on the high hat and a kick drum that sounds deeper. I get some of these effects with my headphones though my speaker system is not up to this yet. I never listen to music without equalization, either clearing up the top end or giving the bottom end more punch.
There is a nice quote in the first video about 'mixing drums across the sound stage' being unnatural, at least I have someone who agrees with me, however I have got so used to processed music that it is not hopeless.
Have a listen to my favorite classical guitar piece, it is very moving, but listening now, it does not sound like a guitar up close, it sounds like it has a exaggerated lower frequency range, good for fullness of sound, but this is not, in my opinion, how a real guitar sounds, even in a cathedral.
Just as an example I like this mix: not what a real drum set sounds like I guess but I am glad they processed it. Steve Smith is a genius. Listen from 33:50. I have this LP and transferred to CD.
I would have liked the drums mixed left center though, in total. Ah well, have to wait till recording companies release individual tracks for mixing.
The title should read "the recording and playback process does not result in a sound experience comparable to live music, so let's build one that does"
This system could be used in specialized settings such as a restaurant or a setting where everyone needs to hear the same sounds, in equal proportions, no matter where they sit. This is a complete recording system, though, not just speakers.
Is it possible to take existing tracks and re-process them for 'walk around sound?' maybe.
This system could be used in specialized settings such as a restaurant or a setting where everyone needs to hear the same sounds, in equal proportions, no matter where they sit. This is a complete recording system, though, not just speakers.
Is it possible to take existing tracks and re-process them for 'walk around sound?' maybe.