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Gear / Technical Help => Ask The Tapers => Topic started by: beroti_music on June 20, 2025, 11:10:56 AM
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Im visiting an open air festival soon.
60.000 people. Some delay speaker stacks.
See my signature for the mics I have.
Wich mic would you use and why?
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Which? - mk22
Why? - open patterns are excellent for outside and are more forgiving about placement/direction. Also, the low end extension of subcardiod patterns is more prominent but also more natural. Big outdoor show = big subwoofer setups. Love getting all that big fat bass from a huge outdoor PA.
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Thanks for your input! I thought about it too but the chatter of the the festival audience thinks I should go for hypers.
Anyone else has other ideas?
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Get a set of nbobs so you can run both mk22 and mk41! :bigsmile:
I'd run mk22 as high as you can
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Yeah, what both of those guys said!
Get a tall stand.
Numerous ways to go about recording large festivals and how you choose to do it will be a primary influence on the most appropriate choice of mics. Might record back by the soundboard, might record up in the sweet spot center, might record DFC at the rail in front of a fill speaker, to one side in front of a PA stack, far back behind a delay tower.. That said, generally I'm in full agreement on using mk22 as a straight 2-ch stereo pair. It's an excellent natural sounding open pattern with good bass translation and reduced susceptibility to wind that is likely to shine in that application, and it shouldn't be a problem running them in a properly angled and spaced config at an open-taping festival. Assuming you will be recording from somewhere farther back near the sound board / tapers section, use a tall stand that is well secured against toppling. Getting the mics up high will do a far better job of managing audience chatter than shifting to a more directional pattern used at a low height. Using sufficient spacing as suggested by Improved PAS at that distance from the stage will also help make what audience noise you do pick up less distracting. In contrast, highly directional mics on a low stand will attenuate chatter behind the recording position, but will not attenuate pick up of all the audience forward of the recording position. The best option for managing audience chatter is to get the mics as far away from the chattering audience as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to raise them up high. Alternate options to getting them up high above the audience include using directional mics placed between the audience and the sound source, say DFC front rail in line with a fill speaker, stack taping from over to one side, directly behind a repeater in back, etc., and/or positioning the rig close enough to the source that it's significantly louder than the audience.
Outdoors allows for running patterns that are more open with less of the problems inherent to running the same indoors, and generally pays off nicely. I'd not hesitate to run the 22's..
But then I'd run more than a single pair. I'd run the open-pattern pair spaced more widely than normal which will provide a very natural, open, deep, "sounds like I'm there" foundation and a somewhat diffuse pickup of audience reaction, along with a coincident or narrow-spaced highly-directional pair that won't sound nearly as big, open and natural yet will provide maximum forward sensitivity for clear and more up front sounding pickup of the PA and stage sound from a distance, as a way of combining the best of both. In that scenario, the more open-pattern pair would be the must have foundational part of the recording for me, and the more more directional pair would provide a nice to include additional improvement to it. [edit- Both mk22 and mk41 like David says ;)]
But if I was limited to running a single pair and recording from the sound board area, I'd run the 22's in a Improved PAS configuration on a tall stand.
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Thanks!
I forgot to say it's stealth ;) I stealth cmbi without a problem.
Sold my nbobs a while ago so only one pair of schoeps to run.
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Are you planning to wear the mics or find a strategic placement somewhere? I can't see wearing at a festival unless you are standing near a stack. Festivals are for getting down!
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Are you planning to wear the mics or find a strategic placement somewhere? I can't see wearing at a festival unless you are standing near a stack. Festivals are for getting down!
Went already. cmbi's + mk41 in a kangol. Made stack tapes from front row. There were stacks standing on the ground right in front of me. Tapes came out perfect.
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Good to hear it worked out.
Just posted about this yesterday and will also include it here.. FYI, the technique in the thread linked below may or may not be needed or appropriate for the recording you just made, but can be used to advantage sometimes when stack-taping if you end up doing that regularly. It can correct for the image "wandering around", works well when one channel is picking up more direct PA stack sound than the other, when the balance is skewed to one side, and when each mic is picking up something different than the other in a way that makes the stereo image lopsided, imbalanced or otherwise awkward in straight playback. You can intentionally leverage the technique by pointing one mic directly at the stack and the other away from it toward the audience, stage, or in any other direction.
Re: Have you ever taped in front of a delay stack before? (https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=201100.msg2391324#msg2391324)
^Link is to a post in the thread where the discussion of the processing technique begins. Later in the thread there is a link to before and after examples of it being applied. Feel free to ignore the technical description of what's going. The examples are pretty self-explanatory of what it can do.
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Thanks! Appreciated!