To me when I hear spaced pair of drum overheads in particular I do not enjoy what I hear. Even when they are in phase it feels weird, too separate and unatural to me. When I hear people say that they pan their overheads in and don’t keep them fully wide I always question this. It makes sense for spaced pair to be panned in a little to try to get them sounding more “natural”. I have tried a bunch of overhead micing and I always go back to ORTF. To me ORTF sounds plenty wide and sounds like a drum set. Panning a spaced pair in seems to defeat the “benefit” of a spaced pair which is a wide image. Why wouldn’t a person who is narrowing a spaced pair not originally track ORTF, M/S or blumlein.
It seems most people prefer a spaced pair on overheads. Am I the only one that doesn’t get the infatuation?
A spaced pair panned 50% L/R is still going to give a different effect that an X/Y pair panned hard L/R obviously. Sometimes you actually want a slight hole-in-the-middle effect to fill with your close mics and get an artificial sense of width. A lot of it depends in the particular setup of the kit you’ve been presented with, too.
I guess it’s all just value judgments and largely situation dependent. Then there’s the particular mics you have access to, their polar patterns, strengths and weaknesses…
I don’t record for a living but I mix often and I also don’t like spaced pair. Several years ago I learned the Glyn Johns technique and loved it (I know it’s not an overhead technique). But mic setup is all about the final sound, and if you record with that in mind I think there will be plenty of situations where you’d want spaced pair.
Am I being crazy or isn’t Glyn John’s technique a spaced pair, just in very specific positions?
I like the ‘WeedyWet’ method - basically, a mic on the floor tom side (side of kit) and a mic out from the rack tom (front of kit), adjusted to get a good capture of the whole kit and a decent stereo spread. Often below cymbal height.
Actually yes, it was just a (probably bad) example of not necessarily having the usual A/B spaced pair. In Glyn Johns method the overheads somehow sounds much fuller than A/B. And you don’t pan and mix them equally. Well, I don’t know a lot about the properly done spaced pair, what I’ve usually seen is two mics thrown in somewhere to the left and to the right of the kit without much thought.
for a time I was using a spaced pair in front of the kit for OH, but after seeing a different approach I have putting one in front just left of the first tom to catch the left side and putting the 2nd mic back by the floor tom and distance wise the same as front from snare to the kick maiking the distance from the mic to the snare. I like the end result of this much better infact it was a video Johnthan had posted and there is 4 videos total. I like what he is doing here so ill post a link.
I guess that I am a fan of a spaced pair. Or at least I have no real problem with it…
The thing to keep in mind is that they are not all that far apart. (on a drum set) What… maybe 4 or 5 feet? then, the drums and cymbals are plenty loud so they cross-converge since we aren’t using CIA uber directional mics. So the result is a somewhat general sense of width and separation. I’m ok with that. I tend to pan hard L and R to get back the loss of separation and to get rid of the wash in the middle. It ends up sounding natural to my ears. But I use my OHs mainly for cymbals… not an overview of the kit.
I used x/y for years with pencil condensors mainly because it was easy and I only needed one boom. But later on I experimented with having them equidistant from my ears facing out. I was always having the snare wanting to shift to the left and didn’t realize why until I moved into the box and saw the waveform alignment. So Now I’m back to a spaced pair somewhat equidistant from the centerline of the kick and snare panned hard.
I mentioned in a previous post that you do NOT want any drums panned out beyond the OH image. So I guess hard panning the OHs can be a safety net of sorts.
It works for me on my recordings. But for the most other stuff, I have no idea how the ohs were recorded and deal with it. I’ll decide whether they are cymbal spots or drum set overview and pan in or out accordingly…
have fun
rich
