Recording - July 2015 - 63

It's fairly easy to record a group like this with a stereo pair; these musicians are
used to balancing their own volumes, so I didn't need to tweak the levels on instruments. Most important, they had no vocals. It's possible to integrate vocals into a
single-pair recording, if (again) the singers are accustomed to self-mixing, and
I've done it, but it's a lot harder. Still, it's doable; after all, most of the classic bluegrass records made in the 1950s and 1960s were recorded with a single mic-
or a stereo pair.
When I was planning the Ottoman Underground session I considered doing it
with a stereo pair, probably the same XY pair of KM 84s that I used on the
Buckhannons. If they had planned to record only instrumental music, I might have
done it. We had vocal pieces on the agenda, though, and integrating vocals with
instruments on an XY recording gets tricky-though those bluegrass records show
that it's possible, and I've done it a few times when making live recordings of
house concerts. In this case, though, I decided against a stereo pair, except for
the room mics that started this discussion.
Could you record an electric band with a stereo pair? I suspect that you could
make an excellent instrumental track using a stereo pair, placing amps and
drumkit into appropriate places in the room, then overdubbing vocals, maybe
using the same stereo pair. I haven't recorded this way myself, but Scott Dorsey
does it all the time.

4

...using a single stereo array, if the
musicians are careful with levels.
It's even possible to record a whole electric band, including vocals, with a single stereo array, if the musicians are very disciplined about levels; the Cowboy
Junkies' brilliant first album The Trinity Session was recorded using a single mic
array-in their case, an Ambisonic mic, which is kind of a Blumlein array on
steroids.
Close pairs
Here's another use for true-stereo mic arrays, and I'll warn you that this may
be a personal eccentricity of mine. With tracks now plentiful, it's possible to combine close multi-miking with stereo pairs; just place a stereo pair where you'd
put a single microphone. Instead of panning, you control position by rotating the
stereo array until the instrument is where you want it in the soundstage. Miking
an acoustic guitar or vocal with an XY (or Blumlein) pair can sound far more
solid and robust than using single mics and panpots, and a hammered dulcimer
(piano-after-taxes) recorded with an XY pair of Shure SM81s sounds amazingly
real. If the instrument sounds too wide, you can pan the stereo pair to, say, center and halfway-right; you'll still get amazing realism, depth and solidity.
On some musicians, you can even use a stereo pair for simultaneously
recording an (acoustic) instrument and vocal, by aiming the array somewhere
around the performer's neck and varying the balance by tilting it up and down.
This only works with musicians whose singing level more-or-less matches the
level of their instrument. I did much of Julie Henigan's American Stranger album
in just that way.
Close stereo miking works well on instrument amps; a guitar speaker miked
with an XY pair can sound huge. In fact, doing this is why I bought two ElectroVoice RE200 mics instead of one.
I didn't use this hybrid technique on the Ottoman Underground Sessions, but
I've used it a lot on recordings by Phil Cooper & Margaret Nelson (out of the
Chicago area) and Michael & Gloria Bauermeister (of Augusta, MO). On the
latter recording, Into the Hands of Angels, strategically-placed multiple XY pairs
let me double up instruments and singers on a single array for a sound that was,
again, present yet spacious.
Yes, stereo pairs (singly or in multiples) have served me well for recording all
sorts of music, and if you have the mics available you should give them a try.
Just, please, don't tell my folkie clients that I got the idea of using multiple stereo
pairs from a recording engineer for the Beach Boys?
Originally I was going to follow our discussion of microphones by getting into
the electronic devices that accept their signals and make them useful to the rest
of the audio chain: preamps. But the mic signals still have to get there, and for
that we need-you guessed it-cables. It's a surprisingly involved topic with a
lot of myths to dispel, and we'll cover it next time. See you then.

5

Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag.com) is
a recording musician, engineer, educator, and
collector of bizarre vintage recordings, living
in St. Louis.
RECORDING July 2015

63



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2015

Contents
Recording - July 2015 - Cover1
Recording - July 2015 - Cover2
Recording - July 2015 - 1
Recording - July 2015 - 2
Recording - July 2015 - 3
Recording - July 2015 - 4
Recording - July 2015 - 5
Recording - July 2015 - Contents
Recording - July 2015 - 7
Recording - July 2015 - 8
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Recording - July 2015 - Cover3
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