Recording - June 2015 - 62

Am I the only recording engineer who faces room
mics away from the musicians, to capture more reverberant sound and less direct sound? When I read
other engineers' descriptions of room miking, they
mostly seem to place the mics in front of the musicians,
with the mics facing the band, so perhaps this is personal eccentricity. Still, you might try placing room
mics this way; I've done it for years, and it's worked.
I used a pair of Oktava MK012 small-diaphragm
condenser mics. The MK012 is actually a system, with
a body containing the head amplifier (essential for a
condenser mic), and interchangeable capsules with
cardioid, hypercardioid and omnidirectional patterns.
You can get the mic with any of the capsules, or buy
a complete kit with all three, from oktava.com.

6
But unlike other mics I've tried with similar peaks in the treble, the high
frequencies sound clean; this isn't the hashy, gritty sound I associate with a
peaky high end. The sound is bright, but clear. I've found two sound sources
that the RE200 records really well: it picks up the skin sound on a hand
drum like the Irish bodhrán or the Middle Eastern/North African dumbek
very effectively, and it puts some sparkle in the sound of a guitar amp's
speaker at precisely the frequencies where the speaker is running out of
gas. I realized this when I reviewed a pair of RE200s for the magazine
(Recording, April 1997), and I bought both of them.
The RE200 has another advantage for recording guitar amps: like the
M930 it's transformerless, and will tolerate prodigious sound levels before
it overloads. That wasn't so important at this session, since Shlomo plays at
levels that blend nicely with the other (acoustic) instruments in the band. But
it was nice to know that the mic would sound the same at varying levels,
with no overload.
There was an added bonus: Shlomo plays a mean dumbek, and later in
the session he was planning to switch to that small drum. I planned, when
he did that, to move the RE200 from his bass amp to the top of the dumbek, which would make for another seamless transition, without having to
stop the session to haul out another mic.
What if the RE200 had been too bright for Shlomo's bass amp, or his
dumbek? Just in case, I'd brought along one more Electro-Voice mic, the
dynamic RE15. It's a near-twin of the RE16 I brought as a backup for Will,
except that it has a marvelous flat midrange, and a treble response which
is the antithesis of the RE200's (see Figure 6-"cycles per second" is an
older term for "Hz"), and no pop filter.
In addition to the mics, I took a direct (DI) output from Shlomo's amp. For
more about that, see the sidebar.
Room mics
Along with the close microphones on instruments and voice, I set up a
couple of mics to record the sounds bouncing around the room, which has
a rich, warm sound. I put these mics several feet behind Will, facing away
from the band.

I've found the MK012 with the cardioid or hypercardioid capsule to be a mic that I can use in many
of the same places I'd use a KM 84, and in my
experience it has a similar more-or-less-flat frequency response, on and off axis (Figure 7). I set up the
MK012s in an ORTF array, using the cardioid capsules; that's my standard setup for room microphones.
But what is this ORTF of which I speak? Come
back next month and find out.
Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag.com) is a
recording musician, engineer, educator, and collector of bizarre vintage recordings, living in St. Louis.

Going Direct
If you play an electric guitar, as (according to our surveys) most of you do, you've
certainly noticed that it sounds a lot different with short and long cables. Longer
cables sound duller, without the sparkle
and bite for which electric guitars are
known. Heck, on my G&L neo-Telecaster I
can hear the extra 3 feet of cable that's
used when I connect my phaser pedal.
I don't have room to tell the whole story
here, but briefly this is what happens
when a source with high impedance-the
guitar-feeds a cable with capacitance-
62

RECORDING June 2015

something all cables have, and longer
cables have more. The high source
impedance combines with the cable
capacitance to create a filter that knocks
out the highs. Long guitar cables are also
prone to pick up extraneous noise from
sources in the environment, like motors,
fluorescent bulbs, and light dimmers.
Back in the 1960s, the speakers on
bass amps were only so-so. Rather than
mike them, many studio and live-sound
engineers preferred to feed the signal
from the bass guitar directly into the mix-

ing console. You can guess the problem:
when they tried to run long cables from the
instrument to the control room, or even
longer cables to a live-sound mixing
board, the cables' capacitance combined
with the instruments' high impedances to
kill all the high end, and as a bonus they
picked up all kinds of nasty interference
from equipment in the studio, hall, or club.
There were other drawbacks. I promised
the Editor I wouldn't write a long discussion
on impedance [At least not inside this article-Ed.], but put simply, electric guitars

http://www.oktava.com

Recording - June 2015

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