Mic Placement demo

[Stevien]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

I guess it's actually Vertical Reverse ORTF, so an even crazier band name :-) "VRO" for short...

BTW, after I shot this video, I actually asked the guys who make mic mounts on Shapeways - I used them in some other placements in the video - if they could make a mount for this. It's not all that hard to just do it with the stereo bar as I did in this video, but it's kind of nice to have a mount that has the angle and distance fixed. It looks like they actually created one:

https://www.shapeways.com/product/8E...ionId=84980007

Nice! Even better if it could be shifted vertically or horizontally.
Steve

[Sage97]

Great video. It has helped me discover that I’ve been using the spaced pair technique. Never knew it was called that. I’ve just been doing it that way because I thought it sounded best to my ears.

I’ll try the other techniques next time.

Thanks Doug.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by Stevien

Nice! Even better if it could be shifted vertically or horizontally.
Steve

If you want to be able to adjust positions, the mic bar's the way to go. The benefit of the fixed mounts is that you can't adjust them (aside from siding the mics in or out to create more distance), so you get a set angle between them with no room for error. Nice to have a reliable, repeatable setup, but there's a tradeoff in flexibility. So you decide which you want. For ultimate flexibility, just use two mic stands and you can put the mics anywhere...

[Bob Womack]

I use a ruler and protractor to build my ORTF and reverse ORTF arrays. I keep them in the mic closet with the mic bar to make things easy. And every single time I put one together I check for mono compatibility.

The reason I went with the vertical ORTF array was that the guitar is a geographical instrument - different sounds come from different areas of the instrument. I'd struggled to get a sound that spread across the sound field of the speakers but didn't "steer" you by having one side bright and the other dark. One night before a big session I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea of turning the mics vertical so that they are both pointing at the same geographical area of the guitar. I tried it the next day and it sounded great.

It turned out that producer/engineer George Massenburg had used a coincident X-Y pair in a vertical orientation while he was recording the Trio album by Parton, Ronstadt, Harris in 1987. I'd read his articles in the engineering journals and tucked that idea away and apparently remembered it that night. All I added was the reverse ORTF, an array I'd experimented with for small ensembles.

Bob

[Brent Hahn]

Vertical stereo miking is pretty common, actually. Massenburg, being the autodidact that he is, figured it out on his own but he didn't exactly invent it.

And you won't like it much if the player also sings. :-)

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

Vertical stereo miking is pretty common, actually. Massenburg, being the autodidact that he is, figured it out on his own but he didn't exactly invent it.

I first heard about this placement from Pete Huttlinger quite a long time ago, who if I recall, said he'd been shown it by an unnamed Nashville engineer. I think he called it "vertical XY", but when he shared photos, it was more or less like this, not really "XY".

[The Kid!]

Thank you, Doug!