Topic: Oddball microphone technique (OMT) - part 3

[Gutbucket]

Saturday night Oteil & Friends, running both the OMT8 DPA and OMT4 Gefell rigs on a more substantial, taller stand.   Spyder9's rig (running two near-spaced pairs) is adjacent and just below.  His setup was identical and in the same position both nights.  Kickdown link to his MK41 pair recording, both nights (archive.org)- https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=199152.msg2373384#msg2373384  Dalman's mics can be seen on the opposite side of the big center pole.  I just noticed the stagelip rig in the last photo.  Don't know who was running that.

Photos below taken at the venue. Please forgive the blurriness. My phone camera is broken so I brought and old pocket camera.

[Gutbucket]

Photo of the pregame setup of both rigs in the back yard earlier in the day, which involved bending a short stainless-steel rod into a right angle to allow clamping the OMT4 Gefell rig to the stand by way of a superclamp, transferring the wind-furs from the BAS's of the OMT8 DPA rig (as used the previous weekend, posted about above) over to the skinny foams of the Gefell rig, braiding the four independent mic cables of the Gefell rig together for considerably easier setup/breakdown, and making sure everything was working correctly.

[fireonshakedwnstreet]

Damn, 12 channels. That is freaking sick 😂

[Gutbucket]

^ Another longtime local taper (TS member yet rarely posts) asked how many, then smirked and said- "none of which are soundboard.. sounds like strong evidence of an out of control obsession "  ..which I could not deny.  Yet as obsessions go, at least this one isn't overly self-destructive..   When this all gets too confusing, I just listen to the music play.

I do wish both recorders could have shared the same clock.  I'll need to align and likely stretch one in order to really explore some particularly interesting substitutions between the two rigs, such as the addition of the wide omnis to the Gefells (maybe the rear-facing DPA supercards too), substituting the cardioid Gefell Mid/Side pair for the supercardioid DPA Mid/Side pair in the DPA rig, and other fun stuff.

But a straight basic comparison between the two won't require that.

[fireonshakedwnstreet]

Hehehe best to have all your bases covered! All those channels and there is bound to be the right combination. I was clueless about clock drift until very recently and it was absolute hell getting a sync for a Phil show I did (https://archive.org/details/paf2021-10-13.omt7audmtx.perez.t-flac16). After that I got a DR-680MKII and have everything on the same clock now. Billy Strings was the maiden voyage for that deck (https://archive.org/details/billystrings2022-02-03.omt7audmtx.perez.t-flac16).

The MMAD stuff is real though. I've found combining directional mics gets you great reach. 

As you can see in the attached picture, my current obsession is outboard preamps and outboard pads .

[Gutbucket]

That makes things much easier.  I could have clock-linked the DR-680Mk2 to the R44, and used to do that at times in the past to get 10 sync'd channels. 

Too bad F8 doesn't have SPIDF, nor the current SD Mixpre recorders.  I don't understand dropping that.

[One Cylinder]

The mics near the stage lip were Charlie Miller’s pair of schoeps cmc6/mk4 akg 463. I imagine he also had a feed from the board.

Charlie’s the archivist for Steve Kimock & often does FOH for Steve when the band is one of the Kimock-led ensembles. Charlie usually records the concerts of Steve’s bands via the aforementioned four channel (2 channel feed from SBD + the pair of cmc64 on stage) setup. 

Saturday night Oteil & Friends, running both the OMT8 DPA and OMT4 Gefell rigs on a more substantial, taller stand.   Spyder9's rig (running two near-spaced pairs) is adjacent and just below.  His setup was identical and in the same position both nights.  Kickdown link to his MK41 pair recording, both nights (archive.org)- https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=199152.msg2373384#msg2373384  Dalman's mics can be seen on the opposite side of the big center pole.  I just noticed the stagelip rig in the last photo.  Don't know who was running that.

Photos below taken at the venue. Please forgive the blurriness. My phone camera is broken so I brought and old pocket camera.

[kuba e]

^ Another longtime local taper (TS member yet rarely posts) asked how many, then smirked and said- "none of which are soundboard.. sounds like strong evidence of an out of control obsession "  ..which I could not deny.  Yet as obsessions go, at least this one isn't overly self-destructive..   When this all gets too confusing, I just listen to the music play.

Not at all. This is not an obsession. I don't record as much as the others. I only record very little. Now I use four to six microphones. But if I record more, I would add more because it's fun and it is creative. And it has other benefits. I've learned the basics of recording and post-processing because Oddball and I'm still learning. And most importantly, it discovers new possibilities and it is not a repetition of the same process over and over again. I'm grateful to the Taperssection and especially this thread.

Oddball also directed me to a multi-speaker playback now. I recently expanded my stereo with second pair of speakers. I was surprised at how easy it was. All you need is a sound card that has 5.1 analog outputs and a second pair of speakers. My playback is only 4.0 but even that is sufficient for playing Oddball ,sbd + audience or DTS recordigs (there are a lot of Grateful Dead DTS recordings on the LMA) . Also, no complicated setup or calibration is required for 4.0. Just set a good front and back volume ratio when listening. I know you've discussed it here, 7.1 must be great for Oddball.

[ycoop]

Ran very wide split omnis for the first time (see image, maybe 15' if I had to estimate) along with a center pair in DIN. Felt like my most adventurous set up yet.

https://archive.org/details/ghostlight2022-03-27.ycoop

[Gutbucket]

^ I listened to this this last night. Thanks for posting, and please take this as a hopefully useful constructive critique rather than negative criticism-

This one has a few problems as I see it. 
To my ear this is a situation in which omnis may not be the best choice, as well as an example of a significantly wider than optimal mic arrangement.  Cool looking venue, but based on the archive page photo looking toward the stage (which I presume was taken from the recording position in the balcony) it is IMO too far back in a boxy room for omnis, making their contribution overly reverberant.  If it were more appropriate for them I'd want to bring them closer together to about half that spread. 

In addition, when spaced omnis are wide, a center pair arrangement that tends toward a more center-solid presentation is helpful to really anchor the middle of the playback image.  Think of it as sort of serving to balance the scale as a counterweight to what the wide omnis are providing.  DIN and the other common near-spaced stereo configurations that work well for two channels represent something of an optimized balance of width and center solidity when they are used on their own.  When combined with the over-wide omnis, the result can tend to be a bit weak in the center.  That's one reason I like a coincident pair in the center.  It's sort of the opposite of a wide spaced omni pair, so that when properly balanced against each other, the inherent strengths of each pair serves to help with the inherent weakness of the other.

What might have worked better?
If not changing things too much and keeping the near-spaced center-pair, I'd retain the same spacing but narrow the angle from that of DIN (90 degrees) to PAS, switch the omnis to directionals and move them in to about 6 or 7 feet total.  If it were me running my own stuff, I'd likely run the OMT4 arrangement I posted about above, with a PAS near-spaced supercardiod pair spaced a couple feet or so total, plus a Mid/Side pair in the center.  If I wanted to run omnis too just to see if they'd be helpful (6 ch total) I'd bring those in to about 6-7 feet apart as before, and if the front of the balcony edge was a flat surface I might tape them directly onto it to boundary mount them facing forward, which will help increase clarity and is easy to do with small lightweight omnis like the AT853s.

Thanks for posting and kudos for the spirit of adventure in pursuit of good tapes!

[Gutbucket]

I've found combining directional mics gets you great reach. 

I think there is some merit to this, even though the idea of "reach" is a tricky one and frequently misunderstood.  The first line of approach I think for making the most of a distant recording position is switching to more directional microphones and pointing them more directly toward the source, compensating for the narrow angle by using more spacing between them.

However, I too notice a sort of analogue to the use of a visual telephoto lens as I bring up additional forward-oriented microphones in my arrays spaced horizontally along a line perpendicular to the source. There may be some of this going on with 4 mics, but it begins to become more apparent to me when I bring in a wider than normal near-spaced directional pair along with the base-line wide omnis and coincident center pair.

There may be some phased-array sensor behavior going on, although certainly not to the highly-tuned and optimized degree of antenna theory.  The general idea being that direct-sound arriving on-axis to the array (perpendicular to a line of mics all pointing more or less in that direction) will arrive simultaneously at each and thus remain coherent in their combination, while sound from off-axis (wall reflections, distributed audience) with have phase differences and not combine as coherently.  Before I noticed the effect, I long ago thought about setting up multiple omnis outdoors, spaced in various ways along a line.  There is plenty of room for experiment with this kind of thing, say using three or four pairs of directional mics across the balcony in the example of ycoop's hall above, which is the type of situation in which it would be most useful if it works.  Distant recording positions in reverberant rooms represent one of the biggest acoustic challenges tapers face.  We just need some daring right stuff test pilot tapers to put the idea through a test flight regimen!

[fireonshakedwnstreet]

I ran a seven channel OMT at Tedeschi Trucks Band on Saturday:https://archive.org/details/ttb2022-03-26.omt7audmtx.perez.t-flac16

OMT7 AUD MTX (24/44.1)
Channels 1|2: Studio Projects C4 (hyper), split 2' @ 45º -> Naiant MidBox -> Tascam DR-680MKII
Channels 3|4: Audio Technica 853Rx (omni) A-B split 3'-> Sound Devices MixPre -> Tascam DR-680MKII
Channel  5:   Tascam PE-120 (w/ JVC M510 short shotgun capsule) @ 0º -> Shure FP11 -> Tascam DR-680MKII
Channels 6|7: Audio Technica 3031, X-Y PAS -> Oade PMod Edirol UA-5 (digital out) -> Tascam DR-680MKII

Mixing Notes:
AT 3031: +5db
SP C4: +3db
AT 853Rx: -6db
Tascam PE-120: -8db

[kuba e]

Thank you, Fireonshakedwnstreet. It is a very nice recording. I love omt recordings. Was it difficult to mix it?

[fireonshakedwnstreet]

Thank you, Fireonshakedwnstreet. It is a very nice recording. I love omt recordings. Was it difficult to mix it?

Thanks, kuba. It wasn't a bad mixing job. The FOH mix was very good. I just added some tape saturation for warmth and some slight multiband compression around 5-7 khz to deal with the high hat resonances.

[kuba e]

Sometimes it takes me longer to find the good ratio of individual microphones. I am listening via headphones now. I look forward to play it via speakers. I like it a lot. I have very similar mics - SP C4, nakamichi and chris church mics. It is good to hear that it is possible to make good tape with it.