I'm currently working on a 12 minute, 4 movement piece, using keyboards and sythesizers only. The final sound is rather close to real instruments however; I'm not pursuing synth music osund on this piece.

I've got plans for some synth musi, acoustic instruments, and maybe more keyboard music using realistic sounds like I'm doing now.

But first finishing the 12 minute piece...
(for the purists: I'm not quoting earlier melodies in later movements, I'm not using one scale or rhytmic pattern, but I still like it )

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

gasp!

I just don't have the equipment for an online jam session. and I do play guitar; just not very well. and since one of my friends is also one of my favorite professional musicians (the incomparable Heather Alexander), who is way better than I am, I'm out of practice. (I got intimidated, but she thinks I'm a pretty good singer, so I can still do that.)

I can also compose pretty badly. but it sounds like there are enough composers among us so that my skills, or lack thereof, there are not needed. I'm sure we're all relieved. (I can write decent harmonies, though; I took music theory for a full year in college.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yer ahead of me. Half a year of theory plus self-study and my harmonies suck. Yeah, I know the theories of counterpoint and I've even tried my hand at a little four part vocal arrangeing -- but my lines are, at their best, leaden.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Hmm. In over fifteen years in the recording industry I've never heard the term "phasic microphones". Is that another name for M-S micing or one of the other standard stereo mic techniques (e.g. A-B, XY, ORTF or Blumlein)?

I don't remember whether he said "phased" or "phasic", and the context didn't make it clear whether he was making up a word or using one from the industry. So you tell me.

Imagine an X/Y setup using double-sided cardioids but with the axis tilted about 30 degrees away from the performers in the centerline plane. Does that have a name?

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Boy, a picture really would be worth a thousand words here.

Unfortunately, "double-sided cardioid" really doesn't tell me much- there are mics which generate different directional patterns by combining the outputs of two oppositely-facing cardioid capsules with appropriate proportions and polarity. You can generate all of the first-order mic patterns in this way, from omni through card to bidirectional (you can do the same by summing an omni and a bi). Examples include the Neumann U67 and U87, or the AKG C414. In condensor mics the contribution of each capsule is usually controlled by varying the polarization voltage on the back diaphragm, which allows for remote pattern control, a' la the AKG C12 and Neumann M49 and M269. Unless you check the pattern selection control, there's no way to tell by eye what pattern such a mic is producing.

If the setup was two coincident mics with the axes arranged at 90 degrees apart in the horizontal plane and the line bisecting this angle as the stereo centerline, that would be either an XY or a Blumlein. The difference is that XY uses two cardioids and Blumlein uses two bidirectionals. Since the Blumlein configuration has live lobes in the rear half-plane, it's a bit better for picking up ambience from the rear. I've found it very useful for room micing when recording drums.

OTOH, if the axis of one mic was pointed straight ahead, and the other mic was pointed side-to-side, that would most likely be an M-S (mid-sides) configuration. The mid mic (the one pointed ahead) is a cardioid and the sides mic (the other one) is a bidirectional. The left and right signals have to be derived by matrixing the mid and sides signals- if the front of the bidirectional mic is pointed to the left, then left = mid + sides and right = mid - sides.

The neat thing about this method is that the width of the stereo image can be manipulated by controlling the proportions of mid and side signals used to derive the left and right- if the sides signal is reduced to zero while keeping the mid signal, you get a mono image; if the mid is reduced to zero while keeping the sides signal, you get the your-speakers-are-out-of-polarity sound. In between the two extremes there's a useful range of image widths, and, if you record the M & S signals instead of the derived L & R signals, you can do this manipulation in post-production.

My guess is that the 30 degree tilt you describe was probably the engineer's way of controlling the balance of direct versus reflected sound picked up by the front mics.

As to the use of the term "phased", an awful lot of recording engineers incorrectly use "phase" in place of "polarity"- a usage which has won quite a few assistant engineers my fifty-cent lecture on the difference. [-X

But, without a good close photo of the setup, I can only make some moderately-educated guesses about it. :wink:

Now that you mention it, "double-sided cardioid" doesn't make any sense to me either. I have no idea why I said it that way. I don't remember the exact model, but they were Neumann microphones and they had the little switch that lets you select between bidirectional and cardioid. We had in them bidirectional, so Blumlein appears to be the closest of the standards.

Imagine that, but instead of having them arranged opposite each other along a purely vertical axis, imagine that axis tilted about 30 degrees toward the performers. Now we had the extra mics because there was a screen between us and the rest of the space. They were simply out there where they would get essentially nothing but reverb from the other side of the screen.

The engineer was Robert "Bob the Sound Guy" Abeyta, and he's quite sought after in our area. He's no slouch. But he does tend to be aloof when he's working, so whatever he said to me was probably just to get me to go away and quit asking questions.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

If the pattern selection was cardioid/bidirectional with no other options, they were probably U48s. Nowadays a U48 or U47 (identical except the patterns were cardioid/omni) in good condition routinely fetches >$10k on the vintage gear market- perhaps more if it's a pre-1956 specimen (if the headgrille is shiny chrome, that's a pre-'56; later versions had a matte finish on the headgrille and a shorter body).

We all develop our own personal micing tricks, which are somewhat like trade secrets. If you asked me why I was taping that funny-looking thing with the wire coming out of it to the wall after setting up a close mic on a guitar amp, I'd probably have handed you a tweaker and told you to go align the ADATs. :wink: