Ribbon Mic Summit

Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Gino Robair

           
 

Ten top engineers share their favorite techniques.

Kicking It

Dooley relates a classic bass-drum miking technique used in the studios of Capitol Records for decades. “The frequency response of an RCA 44 goes down solid to 20 Hz, but you'd blow the mic out if you aimed it right into the bass drum. What Capitol would do on all the pop sessions from the '40s up into the '70s is take the bass drum with no head on the front, throw a sandbag inside it, which tends to keep it in place nicely, and then lay a 44 on top of that, so the 44 is laying flat and aiming towards the inside top of the bass drum shell. You also get the sound of whatever resonance there is from side to side inside the kick.”

FIG. 6: Dusty Wakeman uses the bi-directionality of the Royer R-121 to capture both the front of the bass drum head (aiming the positive side of the mic at the beater) and the bottom head of the snare drum. He then flips the polarity of the mic by 180 degrees to make it phase coherent with the mic pointing at the front head of the bass drum and the mic on the top of the snare drum.

Wakeman suggests another interesting way of using a ribbon mic on the bass drum — on the beater side of a kick drum (see Fig. 6). “Place it between the beater and the bottom of a snare, pointing at the beater. In this application, you're taking advantage of the bidirectional nature of the mic. If you point it on an angle, you can use it for both the beater side of the kick drum and to get the bottom of the snare coming in the back side of the mic. Then you reverse the phase on the ribbon mic, so that it puts it both in phase with the front of the kick drum and the top of the snare. If you compress that, and you bring it up in the mix, you get a lot of size. You want the mics to be electrically in phase, and you'll know instantly if they are in or out once you hit your phase button.”

Listening from Above

Hogarth also uses ribbon mics to “detoxify” the hi-hat. “The thing I like about ribbon mics is the warm, muted top end instead of the bright, splashy top end you would get out of a condenser mic. So if you want to make the drums a little more jazzy or punchy, use them as overheads. But the problem is that because of the figure-8 pattern, you're going to get the ceiling. So you have to be careful that you have a decent-sounding ceiling or else you'll end up having a boxier sound than you really want.”

Many of the engineers — Ainlay, Hogarth, Schmitt, and Wakeman — use the Royer SF-24 stereo ribbon mic, with its Blumlein pattern, as a drum overhead. “I raise and lower it in height depending on how much spread I want to get, and how much focus I get at the center of the snare drum,” says Wakeman. “The lower you get it, the wider the stereo spread is going to be. But you want to get it high enough that the cymbals sound good.”

Although Churchyard uses ribbons only as overheads on drums, he prefers to use a spaced pair. “I like the Coles 4038 as an overhead mic. It makes the kit sound really musical. I put one over the area of the snare and hi-hat, and one over the area of the floor tom, usually about 2 to 3 feet apart, and about 6 or 7 feet above the kit — far enough away so the drummer doesn't hit them.” On occasion, he'll add a touch of compression to the overheads, with a ratio of 2:1 or 4:1.

Shaking All Over

Ribbon mics are also great for taming the rough sounds of hand percussion. “When recording shakers,” Hogarth says, “I want them fatter: I don't want them spittier. So I usually add some midrange EQ. When you listen to the Rolling Stones, those shakers are all in the 500 Hz to 2 kHz range of the mix. They're crunching away in a good way; they're not spitting away. They're not 10 kHz shakers. They're not 5 kHz shakers. They're lower. I find that ribbon mics bring out those frequencies by muting the top end in a nice way.”

“I just did a Brazilian album and used two Royers as a Blumlein pair on maracas,” notes Swedien. “You may think this would give you a big pickup pattern, but it doesn't. I purposefully kept it very small, and the resulting sound is fantastic. And it's not mono: it's not a single-point source, but it's not moving around the stereo space.

“When you use a Blumlein pair on a single-point source,” he continues, “you preserve the polar response of the sound source, so you don't lose the width. The sound moves, but it doesn't move in an apparent fashion. It moves with the spectrum — very much like you would hear it live in a band.” (See the sidebar “Thinking Ahead with Ribbon Mics.”)

Swedien also points out an interesting way to record hand drums.

“I use one of the ribbon mics very, very close. Then, if I have a good studio — one that is fairly free of peaks and valleys in its response — I will put the other mic across the room. Then I record both mics at the same VU. The result is very interesting to the ear.”