Of Interest to Recording Engineers: Interesting 1971 Article On Distant Mic’ing

Above: what the authors suggest you do NOT do…

How y’all doing out there in the land of Ooo…  srry for the dearth of new ‘content’ lately; it’s been v v busy here at PS dot com HQ.  Anyhow, I recently came across an interesting article in an old issue of DB magazine concerning distant-mic’ing.  The authors are Roger Anderson and Robert Schulein; you can download it here:

DOWNLOAD: Distant_Micing

Essentially, the concept is that best-results with distant-mic’ing are obtained when the microphone is as close to the most prominent boundary (in most cases, the studio floor) as possible.

I use both a distant-mic and a close -mic on pretty much every instrument that I record at GCR; I don’t always use both sources, but shit, we’ve got a big, great-sounding room, why not record it?  But I’ve always set the distant-mic on a stand approx. 4-feet above the floor, much like the diagram above.   I carefully position it to obtain what I feel is an appropriate balance between direct and reflected sound, but I’ve never thought much about how far it is from the floor.  Anderson & Schulein make a very compelling argument for doing otherwise, and I’m gonna give it a shot at this week’s sessions.

To all my working recording-engineer readers:  thoughts on this technique?  Weigh in,,,