Blues Jam-Stereo recording

Stereo Recording-Blues Jam

The Stereo Recording project was an interesting assignment in which we were challenged to create a recording of a small ensemble. The recording was to be live with no overdubs and was to feature no post production. This was to make the actual recording the focus; to make sure that the main aim was to capture the sound as realistically and sonically accurate as possible.

The group I was part of included myself and other music tech’ers, Daz, Espen, Sonny and Phil. Collectively we decided to record us performing a blues jam with both me and Daz playing acoustic guitars, Phil playing a djembe, Espen rocking a tambourine and Sonny taking charge of Pro Tools.

Mic selection is an important consideration when doing any recording.  In the recording of acoustic instruments, condenser mics are considered more effective as they have a wide, smooth frequency response and capture a more detailed sound.  We used a pair of AKG C1000S cardiod condenser mics for this reason.

When doing a stereo recording, choosing a microphone technique which suits the sonic situation is as important as the microphone choice.  This is because the spaceing of microphones near or far from each other creates different stereo spreads. The further the microphones are spread, the further the instruments are spread across the stereo range, with instruments nearer one mic being louder in one channel and instruments between the microphones featuring equally in both as phantom images.  

However spacing microphones too far creates issues with phase cancellation. This is when signal to one microphone is delayed in comparison to another, which can be avoided by using closer parings such as coincident pairing or near-coincident pairing techniques.

Having two guitars it felt better to use a spaced pair. This meant that one guitar could be mixed left and one right. The djembe and tambourine were in the middle of the two guitars so that they would be more central in the mix. So with me on the left and Daz on the right we both had microphones in front of us a few feet away and a few feet away from each other.

The jam itself consisted of me and Daz running through a standard 12bar blues in E, with us taking turns at soloing. The first solo is mine and for it I leant in closer to the microphone to increase the signal as to not get drowned out, in a way turning the volume up on myself, something which was important as no post production was to be used for this assignment. Then Daz took a solo and used the same technique of leaning in closer to the microphone nearer him to boost his volume.  I really like the way this technique worked in the recording and think it really shows off the stereo aspect.

For me the sound of the djembe sounds quite week, due to phase cancellation maybe as the djembe was quite far from both mics. If we were to repeat this I’d like to find a way to capture the sound of the Djembe more accurately, maybe another mic would be necessary.