ridemy, is your concept of shotgun microphones that they're like regular microphones but with a considerably narrower directional pattern than cardioids? A lot of people seem to think that, but it's a half-truth at best.
Shotguns generally are only maybe about 15-20% "more directional" than cardioids for about 3/4 of the frequency range; as far as low and mid frequencies are concerned, you could record from about 15-20% farther away and still get clarity like you'd get with cardioids at 15-20% closer range. But it's not a 50% or even a 25% improvement in terms of the "distance factor" of the pattern. And yeah, somewhere up around a few kHz their response starts to lessen at certain angles in the front hemisphere, which gives them a general tendency toward narrowing further if you average out their response at different angles.
But at any particular angle off-axis, their high-frequency response is generally pretty bumpy. It takes an unusually honest spec sheet to show this, but shotguns don't have smooth response characteristics at upper-mid or high frequencies except for sound sources that are directly on axis or fairly nearly so. When professional film and video sound recordists use shotgun mikes, they're always careful to keep whoever is speaking "on mike" at all times, or else the sound quality tends to become dull and spitty. The very best shotguns ($2000 and up) are better at avoiding this, but the whole way that shotguns work means that they should only be used when the direct sound is all coming from a relatively narrow arc in front of the microphone.
The thing is, when you're recording in stereo with a pair of directional microphones, they are usually coincident or closely spaced and are aimed apart at some angle from a forward-facing "center line" between them. Each mike is picking up sound from a wide array of angles and the direct sound is generally NOT arriving on axis or nearly on axis of either microphone (or if it's on-axis for one mike, it's way off-axis for the other one!).
In order for such arrangements to pick up stereo sound in an accurate and listenable way, the microphones really need to have smooth response off-axis as well as on-axis. Your Schoeps MK 4 capsules are prime examples of that--it's a quality that Schoeps particularly excels at, and it's a big part of the reason their mikes are so effective for two-mike stereo recording. But by definition shotguns can't have that response characteristic at high frequencies--and by definition their directional pattern at high frequencies is quite different from their directional pattern at low and mid frequencies. So they fundamentally lack the two most important characteristics for high-quality two-microphone stereo recording in a coincident or closely-spaced setup.
Please try to borrow someone's MK 41 capsules and try them instead. Or maybe even try M/S recording with an MK 41 as your M microphone--depending on your matrixing factors, that's often like having even greater directivity than a coincident pair of supercardioids. As a last resort, try M/S recording with a good-sounding shotgun (Schoeps, Neumann, Sanken) as the M microphone--but don't expect miracles; the difference in available distance factor isn't anywhere near what the comparative lengths of the microphones might imply.
--best regards
Topic: Shotgun question (Read 8334 times)