![]() ![]() ![]() Ken Nelson, for instance, uses a separate ambient mic for acoustic guitar: "What I tend to do sometimes is have something like a KM84 cardioid mic, and I'll have, say, a 414 set on figure-of-eight as a room mic. Using ambient mics for drums may be old news for some readers, but the same kinds of techniques also appear to be fairly common currency for other instruments too. Typically we would use 36 microphones to record the drums, but we would have nearly double that amount set up." So the bass drum was halfway between the floor and the ceiling, equidistant to all eight corners of the room, and we had ambient microphones in each of the eight corners, plus close microphones and overhead mics. ![]() Going in the other direction, Joe Barresi, Dave Eringa, Eddie Kramer and Dave Tickle have all stated a preference for a third mono mic in addition to the pair: "I love to use a combination of a stereo and a mono room mic," enthuses Barresi, "so nine out of 10 times I'll have three tracks of ambience." Chris Thomas, Bill Price and Ian Little go a step further, using two ambient pairs in different positions, but Roy Thomas Baker leaves them all in the dust: "One set of drums was set up in the Coach House live room, on top of the stage that the band uses on the road. While recording the Pixies, for example, Gil Norton kept things simple with a single high mic over the kit, and the band Athlete took a similar approach. And by far the most common context within which ambient mics are mentioned is that of recording drums - despite his comments above, even Butch Vig admits being partial: "I will put ambient mics on the drums, but I also like to have tight mics."Īlthough the default drum ambience setup certainly seems to be a stereo pair of some description, variations are many and various. As a result, the practice of recording additional ambient mics to separate tracks during tracking has become widespread, because it give a sort of 'best of both worlds' option - real reverb over which you still have some separate control at mixdown. Opening the doors of a studio and placing ambient mics in hallways or adjacent spaces, as described by producer Ben Hillier, seems to be a popular technique.Despite this obvious practical advantage of keeping recordings dry, most producers acknowledge that natural reverb still has a lot to offer a production in terms of a sense of realism and size, even in these days of convolution processing. ![]() The 'reverb' you hear on records is sometimes the result of ambient miking techniques, rather than artificial reverb. You could put it farther back in the mix, but if we wanted something to be way up front in the mix you could also do that." Everything would be really in your face, and then if you wanted to add reverb or echo later you could. One of the fundamental questions that every producer needs to answer is: at what stage is this record going to acquire whatever reverb it needs? At one extreme you have this approach from Butch Vig: " started getting more and more into recording everything very dry, and getting away from ambient mics. So for this feature I've brought together the techniques and opinions of more than 70 of the world's top engineers and producers, to try to give a more wide-ranging and realistic view of how reverb is used at all the different stages of the record-making process. Most articles on reverb, however, tend to deal simply with applying digital reverbs at mixdown, but while this is clearly an important technique, many of the most successful albums have created their reverb sound by other means, and sometimes without any artificial reverb at all. "The ultimate feeling of a good record having various spaces that you feel you're in." Whether or not you agree with Phil Ramone here, there's no denying the importance of a sense of acoustic depth, and the reverb that primarily delivers it, in music production. Following last month's introduction to reverb, we take you through the tips and tricks of some of the world's best producers - many of whom are thinking about the reverb sound they want long before they get to the mix. ![]()
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