Track Star Studios- Week 6 - Posted on 2014-05-30 by Brittany Young

So this week I was on chapter 6. Mic Placement, so when I sat in on a session I wanted to pay attention to how the mic was set-up. We were recording with a musician named Dennis who could play pretty much any instrument, but for this session he played the mandolin and a dobro. Another Recording Connection student had already set up a large diameter cardioid mic, but when Dennis would play it sounded very distant. After moving the mic around to try to get a better sound Josquin told the engineer, Thomas, to switch to a smaller diameter condenser. After the switch and a bit of experimentation with mic distance, we finally got the sound we were looking for. When it came time to switch to recording the dobro again the sound wasn’t quite right. Thomas went back to the first mic, large diameter cardio, and discovered that the student had set the mic up backwards, which was why it sounded so distant. After that all was good and everyone was happy.