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Old 12-13-2008, 05:39 PM   #87
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Nearfield vs farfield continued.

Getting back on track, it may seem almost pointless to talk about farfield miking these days, since almost nobody does it anymore, at least not so far as home-produced multitrack recordings go. But at the risk of wasting oxygen on forgotten lore, there is a lot to be said for farfield recording when it can be made to work, and the principles are still valuable to understand as we get into mixing, acoustics, and sound transmission.

In the olden days, the way to get a "big sound" was to get a shitload of musicians in a room all playing together-- lots of guitars, two pianos, two drumkits, horns, strings, woodwinds, shakers, tambourines, background singers, vibes, xylophone, whatever. Then let a big, natural reverberation fuse it all together. If you listen to those old Phil Spector "wall of sound" or "one mic over everything" records, it's hard to make out any particular instrument, or sometimes even the lead vocals. The sound could be huge, but every single instrument is small, just a little bit of texture in the overall effect. This is like that symphonic synth patch referenced above, favorite of heavy-metal intros.

But a lot of things were different in those days. One of the biggest differences was that the musicians were basically considered anonymous, disposable role players. These were the days of house bands and label contracts and separate in-house songwriting and arrangement teams and salaried stars and so on. Pre-Beatles, in other words, the days before guitar gods walked the earth.

Nowadays every musician is supposed to sound like a sonic super-hero. The bass player who earns his living as a professional octave pedal with tattoos and who occasionally plays a leading seventh must be clearly heard, for all to appreciate his seventh-playing prowess in all its glory. The punk guitarist palm-muting quarter-notes in the key of the fretboard dots has to have sixteen tracks lest the chunka-chunka fail to overwhelm and subdue any aspect of the listener's central nervous system. The DJ whose sheer artistry allows him to hold a headphone with a single shoulder while simultaneously operating a fader and playing records must not be made to feel like a second-class citizen by having his performance obscured by more pedantic forms of music.

In other words, putting the band in a room with thirty other musicians and capturing a massive sonic vibe of creative energy is not likely to please the client. Unless of course it is overlayed with double-tracked, close-miked, compressed and hyped-up versions of the "named member" performances.

Even if you eschew the old ways of doing things, it is useful to consider some of the potential of farfield recording, and some of the implications of doing everything nearfield.

One immediate and often overlooked effect of recording nearfield is that reverb applied to a nearfield recording does not sound the same as an actual recording of the performance of the room. People go searching high and low and spending fortunes trying to replicate the old plate and chamber reverbs of yore, trying to get that big, rich, warm, natural sound. All without stopping to think that a reverberated nearfield recording of a guitar does not sound like an old recording of a guitar in a room BECAUSE THE NEARFIELD RECORDING DID NOT RECORD THE WHOLE SOUND OF THE GUITAR.

So when you throw some fancy plugin or all-tube spring reverb on a close-miked guitar sound or drum overhead and it sounds splashy and brittle and artificial, that is at least in part because IT'S NOT PROCESSING THE SOUND OF THE INSTRUMENT IN THE ROOM. It's processing the sound of a surgical capture of an exaggerated microscopic part of the sound.

You cannot make a dehydrated steak taste like real steak by adding water. You cannot do it with vintage water or all-tube water or water with ceramic capacitors or water salvaged from an early session at Sun studios, because the dehydration process changes the chemistry and texture of the steak and alters more than just the water content.

Similarly, and this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, just a thing, nearfield recording is not the same thing as recording in an anechoic chamber. It's not just "instrument sound minus room sound," it's a distorted and selective recording of particular parts of the sound. "Just add reverb to reconstitute" does not necessarily bring it back to life in the same state it was. If you put a recording of a telephone call through reverb, it is not going to produce a convincing illusion of a person speaking in a room, it's going to sound like a reverberated telephone call. Even if you have the best reverb in the world.

Now, this is not to say that you can't achieve great results with reverberated nearfield recordings, and it's not to say that you even need reverb. And nearfield recordings can often sound better than the actual sound of the instrument in the room, especially if you have a bad room.

But a lot of the double- and triple- and quadruple-tracking of instruments and finicky use of delays and general obsession with "fattening" and "thickening" that goes on these days is part of a complex effort to try and restore the sense of size, volume, and richness that is lost when we strip away the fully-developed sense of sound pressure moving air molecules by close-miking everything.

Something that I am certain exacerbates this process is failure to understand the effects of level-matching. During mic placement, when we pull the mic back away from the source, it gets quieter. Remember what that does to our perception of the sound?

This is very hard to compensate for in real-time. Even if you adjust the gain after re-positioning the mic, the immediate effect of the transition (before you compensate for the level change) is of a sound that gets bigger and hyper when you nudge the mic closer, and smaller and weaker when you back the mic off. That immediate impression is hard to shake off, even if you're on the lookout for it (which a lot of people are not, even professionals who should know better).

This creates a highway to hell for the well-meaning recordist who wants a "big" but "natural" sound. When they back the mic off, the snap reaction is that they lost some "big." When they push the mic in, they get big back but lose some "natural." So they try a little reverb to put back the natural. This increases the signal gain and gives even more "big," but doesn't quite sound as "natural" as it should. So they fiddle with delays and compression and try adding more doubled-up tracks and whatnot to try and "smooth" out the sound and "fatten" it up and so on. Which will, of course, add more signal strength and push the whole thing a little closer to clipping, at which point they have to back off the signal level and end up deciding that they need a 12-foot plate reverb or an Otari machine to get "natural" tape delay (both of which of course add a little more signal gain).

Repeat this process for eight months and spend an extra $83,000 of the starving band's advance money and eventually you end up with a quarter-million-dollar, radio-ready commercial recording of a clipped, phase-smeared, hundred-and-eighty-tracked, fatigue-inducing mix of a three-piece folk-rock group that is ready to be sent to mastering for further limiting.

To their credit, most home studios usually give up a lot earlier in the process, but they are still desperate to know the "secrets" of how the pros work.
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