Amateur Recording, Part 8. Microphone Placement. Amateur Recording Part 8. Microphone Placement Just as there is a wide range of microphones available on the market, there are also a wide range of accepted mic placement configurations for stereo recording. This section discusses four of the most common or interesting of these configurations: AB, XY, MS, and binaural. AB Configuration The AB configuration is the simplest of them all.
It combines two cardioid microphones spaced several feet apart and facing forward, at slight angles to one another. One particular problem with this configuration is that it is subject to phase problems. AB configuration. XY Configuration The XY configuration defeats the beat frequency problem by placing the two cardioid microphones very close together, coincident at 90o. XY configuration. MS Configuration The Mid. MS configuration. Binaural Configuration The binaural configuration is an old but infrequently used configuration these days. Binaural configuration. Mix Magazine | Pro Audio, Live Sound, Music Recording and Live Post for Audio Pros. Free Utilities & Plug-ins For Pro Tools.
Technique : Pro Tools Notes Improving your Pro Tools system needn’t always cost money. We look at some essential add-ons that can be downloaded for nothing. Mike Thornton As we start a new year, money can be short after the excesses of the Christmas festivities and January sale purchases. In this month’s Pro Tools feature, then, we’ll take a look at some donationware software and free plug-ins that could be a welcome relief to strained wallets!
Management Is Easy Plug-in Manager makes it easy to avoid those annoying ‘Try, Buy or Quit?’ The Mac OS X utility Plug-in Manager from Maison Sonique is ‘donationware’, written by sound designer and composer René Overhorst. Plug-in Manager lets you disable and enable plug-ins and check for duplicate versions. You can create and manage sets of plug-ins from a ‘side drawer’ of the main window, so you could set up a number of different configurations on your Pro Tools system to suit the licences that engineers carry on their personal iLoks. 25 Secret Ways to Get the Guitar Tone of Your Dreams. We've got 25 great ways to help you make your gear sound great and perform at its best, plenty of which are simple “trade secrets” of the pros that you probably haven’t encountered before.
Enjoy! Tone Tip #1: Clean It Up Most traditional tube amps have two inputs, one for high gain and the other for low gain, but very few players ever use input 2. Plenty of tone-conscious pros know, however, that plugging into that low-gain input can help clean up fat humbuckers, and in many cases will sweeten your tone. Tone Tip #2: Pickup Heights Learn how to tweak your pickup height to optimize your guitar’s response. This makes a lot more of a difference than you might think, and in some unexpected ways! Tone Tip #3: Pick A Winner The skinny on the tone of the humble pick. Tone Tip #4: It All Starts With The Wood However superlative your pickups, you’ll never get the tone you’re looking for if the wood is working against you.
Tone Tip #5: Use Your Volume Control! Obvious? Tone Tip #7: Set It Up. Guitar Effects and How to get a good guitar sound. These sounds originate from people turning old valve amps up a lot louder than they were designed to go, making the sound “break up”. This sound is created because of the way a guitar signal acts in a valve when there is too much signal going into it and also the sound of speakers when they are being pushed too hard.
There are also many overtones created, making the sound thicker. The sound can also become “compressed”, squashed with less difference between loud and quiet. Valve products (both amps and pedals) usually sound better, warmer and clearer, but are more unreliable, heavier and more fragile. Solid State (also called Transistor or Digital Distortion) tends to sound more metallic or synthetic and not as real. Master Volume is another popular feature where the pre-amp (think amp 1) can be very distorted and then fed into another amp (think amp 2) which can be set more quietly. Overdrive, Distortion, Gain and Drive Pedals can also give a similar sound.