Ribbon Mic Summit

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

           
 

Ten top engineers share their favorite techniques.

The Bassics

Ainlay will often use two mics to track an acoustic bass. “I'll put a ribbon mic out in front of the f hole, and point a condenser between the two hands of the player, a foot or foot and a half from the bass: both mics are about the same distance away. The upper mic gets more of the percussive sound of the bass, while the mic at the f hole gets the fundamental.”

Hogarth has a similar concept when recording the bass: “I have it just about where the f hole is, back just a few inches. Sometimes optimum mic placement is not optimum for the player. Particularly when it comes to upright bass, you have to position it based on where the player is standing, as well as where the focus is of the performance. Is it on the high strings going up the neck? Or is the player laying down the low end?”

Hogarth will also augment the ribbon mic with a condenser or a contact pickup through a DI, which he will blend in as necessary. “The second mic will be some kind of large-diaphragm condenser, placed alongside the ribbon mic and blended for phase.”

The Big Picture

Wakeman notes that ribbon mics can be used to put other instruments in their place, mixwise. “I really try to paint a picture in the track. If you use a bright vocal mic, you shouldn't need to add a ton of presence or top end to get it to cut through in the track. The more ribbon mics I use, the more of a natural bed I've created in the backing tracks. And that way, the vocal just sits right in there, without having to work too hard.”

Near the end of his interview, Hogarth offered a reality check on being too specific about which mic to use and where you put it. “If you try to take what I'm saying and lay a template over your recording, it's going to suck. Understand that I'm using ribbon mics like EQ. Take the direction, but use your ears.

“I try not to engineer with the lab coat on,” Hogarth continued. “If it sounds good, I use it. A lot of times I'll just put a mic somewhere and see what it sounds like. If it sounds cool, that's good. If it doesn't sound good, I'll blow it off. The key is keeping your mind open.”

Gino Robair is a senior editor at Electronic Musician.

THINKING AHEAD WITH RIBBON MICS

Using ribbon mics in the initial recording of percussion tracks can definitely make life easier when it comes to mastering a recording. Here's how it works: if you have the Michael Jackson album Off the Wall, listen to “Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.” Listen carefully to the percussion: it is Michael and his brothers playing glass bottles. I wanted the glass-bottle percussion in this piece of music to have a unique sonic character and a great deal of impact in the final mix.

The year was 1979. I used a mic technique that came from my experience during the days when it was difficult to put much transient response on a disc. I used all ribbon, or velocity, microphones to record the glass-bottle percussion section. The mics I chose were my RCA 77DXs and RCA 44BXs.

If I had used condenser microphones, with the condenser mics' ability to translate the entire transient peak of the bottles, the bottles would have sounded great played back from tape in the control room, but when it came time to master, such an incredible transient peak would have minimized the overall level — on disc, cassette, or CD — of the entire piece of music. In other words, condenser mics would have compromised the dynamic impact of the sonic image of the entire piece of music.
— Bruce Swedien
(Reprinted with permission from Mix magazine.)