Recording - August 2016 - 72

Recording Musician, Hear Thyself
When tracking, sometimes headphones aren't the best solution

Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey

and fed a mono signal. At a point directly between the two monitors, the sound
cancelled out pretty effectively. I put a
single point stereo pair (XY cardioids) at
the point right in the center, and put the
singers around it. They could hear themselves naturally, and they could move forward and back in order to change perspective. There was some leakage into
the vocal mikes, but it wasn't severe
enough to be a problem once the orchestra was mixed in. I did find that most of
the leakage was at higher frequencies,
so rolling the top end off on the playback
helped reduce the leakage somewhat.
Another classic solution to vocalists
not being able to hear themselves is the
hand cupped over the ear. With the finger tips on the side of the head and an
inch or so between the ear and the
palm, a channel is formed that forces

envelopment, but you lose all sense of
where you are, because the sound doesn't change with your head movements.
I can imagine a future, though, where
it's possible to have headphone mixes
that move along with your head and
give you a real sense of the actual
space around you, as if you had no
phones on at all. At the last European
AES show, Tom Weill and Andrew
Horsburgh of Solent University in the UK
had a paper called "Auto Panning In-Ear
Monitors For Live Performers", in which
small gyroscopes are put on a pair of
headphones so their position can be fed
into a computer, which alters the mix
panning to match the artist's position.
Although this is intended for live stage
applications, this sort of thing might be
very handy in a lot of studio environments too, where performers miss the

The band seldom needs to hear the vocalist
very well, but the vocalist always needs
to hear him/herself very well.
Today we're used to seeing pictures of
musicians in the studio with headphones
on, to the point where everybody comes
to think that this is just how recording is
done. But sometimes that's not the best
way for performers to hear themselves
and one another, and there are some
alternatives that shouldn't be forgotten.
A few years ago I was recording a
Handel oratorio, and for various political
and budgetary reasons it was impossible
to record the orchestra and vocalists at
the same time. So we ran through the
orchestra parts straight onto four tracks
without any click track, just a count-in for
each take, with each few pages of score
being done in an individual take. When
we went to lay down the vocal tracks,
we found that the classically-trained
singers weren't used to listening on monitor headphones; they had a very difficult
time with intonation, because they way
they heard themselves in the phones was
throwing them off.
I wound up using a technique that I
learned from Ernie Bangs (of Acoustic
Recording in Atlanta) many years ago.
We set up two stage wedges on the floor
just as we would for a live band, but
wired out of polarity with one another
72

RECORDING AUGUST 2016

your voice into your ear while partially
blocking other sounds. This was very
commonly used by jazz vocalists in the
days before stage monitors; it still works
well today, both on stage and in the studio. (See the photo.)
If you have a jazz or folk band whose
members can balance themselves together just in the room and hear one another
fine, there is no problem with putting
them in a room, setting up some microphones, and letting them go at it. They
don't need monitoring. When a vocalist
gets added, the band seldom needs to
hear the vocalist very well, but the vocalist needs to hear him/herself very well.
That's the situation where hand cupping
can become a lifesaver. Yes, you could
make a headphone mix just for the
vocalist, but now they are taken out of
the moment and separated away from
the band... acoustically even if not physically. Having everyone in one room can
be preferable, simply because it lets the
band play together as an organic
whole.
There are a lot of performers who like
to work with a single headphone and
the other ear exposed. Listening to just
the headphone mix, there is a sense of

sense of being in the room when they put
the phones on. [We're starting to see the
beginnings of this process in recentlyannounced products from Sennheiser
and Waves, among others; we'll be sure
to discuss it in these pages as the technology develops.-Ed.]
Until that time comes and that
becomes a commercial product, we'll be
cupping our ears and listening to out of
polarity wedges. Still, I've always wanted to keep a komodo dragon in the studio, for people who complain they
"need more monitor." One monitor
lizard, coming up...!
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com)
is perhaps the youngest old curmudgeon in
the world of audio engineering. He continues to live and work in the Williamsburg,
VA, area, while studying new and vintage
audio gear, commenting on historical trends
in recording, and telling those dratted kids
with their DAWs to get off his lawn.
Photo of Jack Teagarden, Victor Studio,
New York City, ca. May 1947, as part of
the William P. Gottleib Collection at the
Library of Congress (placed in the public
domain by Mr. Gottleib).

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2016