Recording - December 2014 - 46

used the hardware IBP in this situation,
and it just works, period. Similar technology, either presented alone or in combination with other guitar-processing tools,
is also used in a variety of products from
Radial Engineering; their standalone
product is called the Phazer.

Outwitting the
Phase Monster
This is the time to take advantage of one
of the great innovations that DAW-based
recording allows: sliding tracks backward
or forward in time. If you slide tracks until
the waveform of the grille mic is perfectly
aligned with that of the room mic (so the
waveform starts moving upward from zero
at exactly the same time), you'll keep the
Phase Monster under control while still,
hopefully, letting in some of the magic as
the room mic picks up the complicated
sound of the notes bouncing around the
room. It works even better if the amp has an
open-backed cabinet. Let your ears be the
judge: nicely aligned tracks will not have
the hollow, phasey lack of impact that you
hear in tracks bitten by the Monster.
Another possible tactic for using room
mics on an electric guitar is to point the room
mic(s) away from the amp, picking up more
of the room sound than the direct sound.
Taking this to the extreme, I've used a pair of
hypercardioid mics, nose to nose at a 90°
angle, as stereo room mics, panned hard left
and right. You may still need to slide tracks,
but you can get a wonderful combination of
space and impact when you mix the stereo
room mics with a mono grille mic.
Direct + Indirect = Trouble
There's another problem that crops up
when recording from an amp. It happens
when you take a direct feed from the
instrument or amp using a DI, and also
mike the speaker to get some of the dirt it
adds to the sound, which is nice seasoning. The miked signal is, of course,
delayed by the short distance from the
speaker cone to the microphone, and that
can cause the Phase Monster to growl
menacingly. If that were the extent of the
difficulty, you could solve it simply by sliding tracks. But that's not the only problem.
The amp-speaker combination has a
frequency response that doesn't extend
infinitely low, and it's a characteristic of
such frequency responses that they add
phase shift to the signal-more shift as
the frequency gets lower. This means that
simply sliding the direct or miked track in
your DAW won't entirely fix the problem.
Happily, there's an answer: the Little
Labs "In-Between Phase" processor, or
IBP. This is available as a separate box or
as part of Little Labs' LMNOPre preamp,
and they've recently made it available as
a plug-in for use in DAW mixdowns. I've
46

RECORDING December 2014

The singer-songwriter trap
Another situation where the Phase
Monster can bite arises when you record
someone singing while playing the guitar,
with a vocal mic and a guitar mic. The
voice arrives at the vocal mic first, and the
guitar mic a millisecond or so later; the
guitar sound arrives at the guitar mic first,
and at the vocal mic a millisecond or so
later. The Phase Monster promptly attacks.

is carefully placed so the guitar is in its side
null, while the guitar mic is placed so the
singer's mouth is in its side null. This requires
some juggling, and to keep everything oriented properly you'll be tempted to put the
singer into a full-body cast, but it can work
wonders in isolating the two mics' signals
from direct bleed, while picking up diffuse
bleed from the room to preserve the magic.
Photo 1 shows how this works; my thanks to
Scott Dorsey, who covered this topic for the
magazine years ago and whose photos are
still among the best illustrations of the method.
One warning: a Figure-8 mic has the most
intense proximity effect of any pickup pattern, and to keep the recording from sounding unspeakably boomy you may need to
severely high-pass filter the guitar track and,

A singer-songwriter recorded with two figure-8 mics. The vocal mic is turned so
its nulls reject the guitar sound; the guitar mic is turned so its nulls (shown with
arrows) reject the voice. Photo courtesy Scott Dorsey.
What to do? Sliding tracks won't solve
the problem; you'd need to slide the guitar track to match the vocal track, but also
slide the vocal track to match the guitar
track, since the bleed on each one is
delayed with respect to the undelayed
signal. This way lies madness.
One solution, of course, is to record both
vocal and guitar with a single mic, usually
aimed approximately at the singer's neck. If
the mic's off-axis response is good, this can
work; there's one guy I recorded this way
for ten years, using a Neumann KM 84
microphone. I needed a pop filter, since the
KM 84 picks up P-pops strongly, and of
course I could only control the mix between
voice and guitar by changing the tilt of the
mic. (Fortunately, Phil was good at controlling the mix himself.)
A more flexible solution is to use Figure-8
mics for both vocal and guitar, taking advantage of their deep null at 90°. The vocal mic

if the singer is male, the vocal track. On the
other hand, the proximity effect can add bottom to a woman's voice, simulating the
warmth and richness of "chest voice".
Drums: the final frontier
Finally, one situation where the Phase
Monster bites hard is when drums are
recorded with multiple microphones to multiple tracks. It's become semi-standard practice to place a mic on each drum, add a pair
of overheads, and throw in a room mic for
the coup de grace. This is a situation tailormade for Phase Monster trouble, as each
drum bleeds into half a dozen mics aimed at
other drums with varying amounts of delay
and attendant comb filtering. That explains
why, in interviews I've read about recording
sessions, the producer or engineer will sometimes say, "We spent the first week getting
the drum sound right." Well, if you have the
time and money...

Recording - December 2014

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