tl;dr, do that, along with some balance correction as needed. ^
..Or alternately, rather than attempting to center the playback image by rotating the mic array to face the apparent acoustic center while recording, an interesting option is to go the opposite route and intentionally emphasize the imbalance between channels, and use that imbalance to good stereo advantage. This requires post work afterward, but can offer some interesting and useful advantages in "stack tape" and sideways-facing situations. The goal becomes getting sufficiently dry, clear, upfront sound from the PA in one channel and "everything else" (audience, stage sound, reverberant room sound, etc) in the other channel, then applying the techniques we've discussed in other threads about how to handle a badly off-center recording using mid/side and pseudo-stereo techniques afterward. Since we've discussed this a number of times in alternate threads I won't go into to detail here unless you want me to. Essentially the main or PA-dominant "stack-tape" channel is assigned as Mid channel and the other channel as Side. Sometimes that alone works fine, along with dialing in the appropriate ratio to taste. Other times it will cause low frequency content to pull strongly left, If so there are a couple ways of processing the Side channel to prevent that from happening, and to improve things in additional ways. The PA "stack" content ends up dominating the center image, while the stage instruments, audience reaction, room sound and everything else featured in the other channel becomes diffusely spread out to the left and right. It will sound fully stereo but without distinct "only on the left-side verses the right-side" type stereo content, which additionally helps make it more robust to rotations of your your head while making the recording. Head rotation will effect the overall stereo width qualities somewhat, yet in a symmetrical way, rather than altering the stereo balance in a way that makes the image shift toward one side or the other like a change of stereo pan or balance.
It was from playing around with my baffled 4 channel stealth array recordings made in situations where I was off to one side and more or less sideways to the source that I got a good handle on this technique. The baffled LRCB microphone arrangement I use essentially consists of two pairs of baffled omnis, oriented at right angles to each other- one pair facing Left/Right, the other Front/Back. Although its not the primary intent of using this recording method, it does provide for experimentation in using those channels as as two separate stereo pairs, where I found I often liked the Mid/Side processed front/back pair as much or more than the direct L/R pair, partly because it provided control over the resulting reverberant balance, but it also often provided a much more interesting and engaging sense of width and depth - in contrast to a more typical stack tape with both mics facing the stack in which the sound is more baked-in and flat sounding.
Other than a few situations where I had a problematic channel or two that rendered a few of the regular LRCB channels unavailable, most of that experimentation was done simply as an exploration of this idea, figuring out how well it works. In most cases where I was recording from up front and off to one side like this I did end up with four good recorded channels, so I could use them as I usually do after reassigning them to rotate the entire array 90-degrees - so the channel facing the close PA becomes the Center (instead of say, nominal Right), the one facing the audience becomes Back (instead of Left), Center becomes Left, Back becomes Right. ..or rotate everything 90 degrees the opposite direction if recording from the left side of the stage.
I'm not suggesting switching to my 4-ch stealth technique to do the same, only explaining how it provided me with a really great way of testing and comparing these Sum/Difference approaches as an alternate to the traditional Left/Right pair approach.
With a typical directional stereo pair mounted in a hat (steering this back on topic), the operative choice while recording will be to either orient the mic pair directly toward the PA / loudest close source in an attempt to have that centered in the recording, or to rotate either yourself or the hat 90 degrees to emphasize difference rather than sameness across the two channels.
Topic: MK41 config (Read 12881 times)