I do a fair amount of recording for ensemble work and sessions without a bunch of time to spare. I've come across a technique that works really well for me. I've shown a picture of it here before. It just occurred to me late one night before a big session and I posted it here and someone reminded me of where I had heard of it before - in an article where he described recording the
Trio album with Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and Dolly Parton, George Massenberg described turning the classic x,y type in edge. I simply took an inverted ORTF (mics pointed
inward at 110' at seven inches) and turned it on edge. What this accomplishes is a wide soundstage with a strong center but no "bright-on-one-side-and-dull-on-the-other" spectrum issue. It looks like this:
Many people suggest using a single mic, tracking two performances, and panning outboard. There is one little problem with that: the mind is a "difference machine." It senses differences between two things pretty well. If you pan two performances outboard, a keen observer can often be distracted by the differences. Of course you can always pull them inboard a bit, but one technique I use it to record both performances stereo to stereo clips and then use the stereo panner on each clip to spread them wide enough for some stereo interest but enough centrality and overlap to keep them from distracting.
Of course, the standard method for preventing the "difference distraction" is to record three takes, centering one and panning the other two out some. It turns out that the brain isn't nearly as good at discerning differences when there are three of an item. As a result, my standard "doubling" method now is to "triple." And remember: you can always turn off any copies you don't need in the mix, all the way down to one. It is a pain to find stereo interest in the mix phase, however.
I used the triple method on the project I'm now working on. In several cases,
but not all, have pulled back to a single performance. I pulled back to singles for the verses and then blossomed out to all three performances for the choruses, for example.
Bob