Topic: Tetramic on stage?

[rumbleseat]

I've had good results placing microphones on the stage lip for outdoor concerts.  One pair pointed at the band, and another pair pointed at the audience.  In post processing, the audience mics are then *carefully* added to the gaps between songs to enhance applause and responses to band banter.  When this arrangement is merged with a board feed to enhance vocals, I get a pretty good recording. (When indoors, I trade the audience-facing mics for a stereo pair of mics at the soundboard to capture the sound of the room, which has plenty of audience noise.)

Question - Could I use a Tetramic on the stage and achieve the same results?  I think this would be a bit more flexible for creating both the band-facing and audience-facing tracks.  What are the pros and cons of this idea?  I think Gutbucket and Heathen have both used the Tetramic on stage, but often with additional spaced mics in an array.  I'm not convinced that the flexibility and setup simplicity are worth the pricetag, but I'd love to hear thoughts on this.  Thanks!

[Gutbucket]

Works great as long as you are happy with a coincident stereo recording from a single point in space.  Very flexible from that single point in space in that you can angle virtual mics and change patterns however you like.  Pretty much unbeatable for achieving that kind of flexibility in a super-compact on stage setup.   Not as good if you need to space mics across the front or otherwise to achieve good coverage of all sources on stage.  You need to place that mic where it will pick up everything well from that single position.

I learned a lot about coincident mic'ing from using the TetraMic.  I moved on from it when I decided I could do more with the channels I had available to me by using individual mics arranged in specific, non-coincident configurations.  After exploring that path for a while I re-introduced a coincident Mid/Side pair at the the center of my multichannel mic setups.  I think an ambisonic mic such as TetraMic would be an excellent choice in that position, but don't want to sacrifice 2 additional channels to do s which I'm using elsewhere for other mics (4 total are needed for TetraMic or any other 1st order ambisonic microphone).  I may play around with it again at some point, as I could do it if I sacrificed the dedicated rearward-facing near-spaced pair I currently use but do not wish to give up.  Advantage would be a visually smaller rig that eliminates the obviously rear-facing mic-pair. Question will be if a virtual rear-facing coincident-pair that has no front/back spacing from the forward-facing center pair performs as well as a pair that is near-spaced in both left/right and front/back axes.

[rumbleseat]

Thanks for your thought, Gutbucket.
I've never had a good opportunity to compare coincident vs. spaced cards (XY vs DIN) facing the stage, so maybe that's my homework assignment.
For the rear-facing "audience" microphones, I guess that difference could still be important as well.  When I run microphones rear-facing, I don't bother to time align them with the stage-facing set, and I apply a high-pass filter at 200-300 Hz to remove the boom from the monitors.  That mic set is just adding a bit of audience response so the recordings don't sound so sterile.

[Gutbucket]

Deciding if you like how a coincident front facing pair sounds in comparison on to a near-spaced pair is the main thing.. and if a single mic position on stage will work for the situations in which you record.

The rear audience facing mic configuration details are secondary to that, and you can always add a couple milliseconds of delay to the rear facing audience channels to somewhat emulate a bit of front/back spacing between the pairs if that's needed.

If you love the sound you get from a somewhat spaced pair (ambience, depth,  sense of space) and can run 6 channels you can have both with the TetraMic in the center between a widespaced pair.

[kuba e]

I also have the ambison microphone and I like to use it onstage although I record very little now. I use it with a pair of spaced omnis. And sometimes I also recorded sbd, so a total of eight channels. The ambisonic microphone is especially useful onstage/stagelip for me. Sometimes the resulting pattern and direction has a great effect on the balance of instruments and clarity. And if we don't have the possibility of sound check before the performance or we don't often record in the same place, the ambisonic microphone could be great. This is the main reason why I bought it.

The second great option for ambisonic microphone is quadraphonic playback (or surround). I am sending a virtual front ambisonic pair with sbd to the front speakers and a virtual rear ambisonic pair with omni to the rear speakers. There are also more ways to play with it and it's fun.