Ribbon Mic Summit

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

           
 

Ten top engineers share their favorite techniques.

Woodwinds

As with brass instruments, the engineers in this story often reach for a ribbon mic when tracking woodwind instruments, such as saxophones and clarinets. To Ainlay, condensers sound shrill on a saxophone. “But if you put a ribbon on there, it's just the ultimate sax sound. I mic it about 3 feet away, aiming at the keys. If you get too close to the mouthpiece, it gets too reedy, and if you're too close to the bell, it's too brassy.” Wakeman agrees about pointing the mic at the keys, but suggests placing the mic 1 to 2 feet away from the instrument.

Schmitt, on the other hand, combines condensers and ribbon mics when doing sections. “When I'm doing woodwinds, maybe I'll have a Neumann U 67 up on the woodwinds and a Royer stereo mic up for the overall room sound. That'll be about 10 feet above the section, maybe 4 or 5 feet in front.”

“I love using either Royers or RCAs on keyboard reed instruments that can be a little harsh sounding in the midrange,” notes Chiccarelli. “I love them on accordion — usually right in front, depending on the instrument. You have to listen a little bit for the sweet spot, but it tends to be somewhere between the keyboard and the bellows. On pump organs, I usually place the mic in the back. I find there's a little bit more sound there.”

Strings and Things

Ribbon mics are preferred by many engineers for recording bowed string instruments. “The figure-8 pattern works in your favor,” Chiccarelli explains. “If you're in a decent-sounding room, the distance from the mic to the source sets your proximity-effect balance. For a violin or viola that you want to sound warm and natural, mic it anywhere between 2 to 4 feet overhead, pointing at the bridge/f hole area.”

FIG. 9: John Kurlander’s work with renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman resulted in this configuration: two RCA 44 mics are placed at a 90 degree relationship.

Hogarth also records the violin from above. “How high you set your microphone is going to depend on how hard the player is digging in. Ribbon mics give you the proximity effect: the closer you get to a source, the fatter it's going to sound. But the violin isn't a very fat-sounding instrument. So generally, a violin doesn't get that much fatter as you get closer; it gets screechier. So there's that balance between being too far away and losing articulation, and being too close and getting the harshness of the bow scraping across the strings.

“Generally there's a certain amount of movement to a violin player,” he adds. “So you will have to approximate where the sway is in their playing.”

Kurlander relates his personal experience with a well-known classical violinist. “I recorded Itzhak Perlman for about ten years, and we came to an understanding about the sound that he liked: it was an RCA 44. The way I miked him had to be compatible with the rest of the orchestral setup. Sometimes it would just be one mic, and that would be a solo spot, because a lot of the violin was being caught on the main mics. In other situations, I went at the violin from two positions. One was aimed down the line of the strings at his face, with the mic out a couple of feet from the end of the instrument. The other would be aimed straight at the body of the violin [see Fig. 9]. When you looked at them, the two mics were at a 90-degree angle relative to each other.”

In contrast, Dooley relates a hybrid miking technique for capturing solo string instruments. “A good way to record an acoustic instrument and still have good room sound is to put one ribbon up close and a pair of good, small-diaphragm pressure omnis back a couple of feet and spaced apart slightly. Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma were soloists in the recent movie Memoirs of a Geisha, and those sessions were done at Royce Hall [on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles]. On Perlman they used a pair of AEA R44s in a Blumlein configuration up close, and a pair of Schoeps omnis back a couple of feet and spaced. They miked Yo-Yo Ma the same way using Coles 4028s. Because these ribbons are fast and smooth, you do get the close-up sound of fingers on the strings, and the plucks, and everything without any harshness.”

“Sometimes I'll use ribbons exclusively, but I usually use them in combination with other microphones,” notes Churchyard. “On a string section, I'll set up some close mics, usually condensers, like U 67s, and room mics, like M 50s. But I'll also set up ribbon room mics — Royer R-122s or the RCA 44s — and I'll mix that back into the sound. I think that adds thickness and depth to the sound. So I'll mix some close ribbon mics in with the room sound and the close mics.

“The ribbon mics are not real distant room mics: they're kind of close. Usually on either side of the conductor. I'll do that for brass as well as strings.”

Kurlander says that he generally uses ribbons in combination with other mics when tracking. “I don't think you can really get away with using ribbons exclusively. The public is accustomed to a brighter orchestral sound than it was 50, 60 years ago. You need a little bit of the modern high end in there as well, just to make the soundtrack competitive.”

But Kurlander notes that on certain projects he uses ribbon mics as a coloring device for the whole orchestra. “I did that particularly on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where we wanted to get a very distinct ‘aged’ sound on the whole score. We put a pair of AEA R44s 4 feet apart, behind the conductor, 6 feet from the floor. And they were positioned in a very wide left-and-right pattern over the whole orchestra.

“What that did was provide a tonal color that is missing from the rest of the condenser pickup, in the fundamental areas between, say, 200 and 800 cycles [Hz]. It provided an old-fashioned warmth that is missing in a lot of the modern mics, which have so much extended frequency on them. I could use the ribbons pretty much as you would use a graphic equalizer. Instead of putting a bump in the lower middle with an EQ, I would be able to warm it up by using more or less of the ribbon pair in the mix. And it also provided another perspective to the audio picture of the orchestra that the other mics didn't have, because they're up high in the air.”