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Best way to mike for room ambience in surround

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Anonymous   05-11-2005 at 05:52:00 PM

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I want to record the ambience of a room in surround (for a 5.1 system)
and was wondering about the best mike setup for that. Are there any
standard techniques?

Thanks.

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Anonymous   05-11-2005 at 09:13:14 PM
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In article <1115837520.533538.190720@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
<gggunnar@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I want to record the ambience of a room in surround (for a 5.1 system)
>and was wondering about the best mike setup for that. Are there any
>standard techniques?

There are dozens of standard techniques. That's the problem.

You're just trying to get wallas?
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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Anonymous   05-11-2005 at 06:59:43 PM
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What is wallas?

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Anonymous   05-12-2005 at 01:10:35 AM
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In article <1115841583.814167.317710@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
<gggunnar@hotmail.com> wrote:
>What is wallas?


Ambient room and crowd noise. If you listen to a room of people just
talking, they are going "walla, walla walla." So we call the tracks
wallas.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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Anonymous   05-12-2005 at 01:30:09 PM
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gggunnar@hotmail.com wrote:

> I want to record the ambience of a room in surround (for a
5.1 system)
> and was wondering about the best mike setup for that. Are
there any
> standard techniques?

Ambience is a musical sound like many others.

For obvious reasons, close-micing is probably not going to
be overly sucessful with ambience. ;-)

OTOH, PZMs can work for ambience. Been there, done that and
I should probably do it more.

I've also used spaced omnis, spaced cardioids, X-Y cardioids
and X-Y hypercardiods.

The spaced mic approaches get you the expected phasy sort of
sound, while the coincident techniques provide more focus.

Now, if the idea of well-focussed ambience of gives you a
headache... ;-)

Scott seems to me to be to be making a good point - and that
is when it comes to micing ambience, a lot of people myself
included are sort of shooting in the dark. I'm currently
making recordings with two pairs of spaced omnis and a pair
of X-Y broad cardioids (6 mics) on 6 tracks...

Different music seems to *want* different kinds of
spatiality. My preference is to leave as many decisions as
close to the finished product as possible. In my economy
performances are one-time occurance and highly valuable,
while mixing time is negotiable.

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Anonymous   05-15-2005 at 02:01:25 AM
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"Arny Krueger" <arnyk@hotpop.com> wrote in news:GMWdndT0zNMhox7fRVn-
sQ@comcast.com:

> I've also used spaced omnis, spaced cardioids, X-Y cardioids
> and X-Y hypercardiods.
>
> The spaced mic approaches get you the expected phasy sort of
> sound, while the coincident techniques provide more focus.

Go out in the hall and find the spot or spots where the sound is near what
you want. If an omni sounds good there, use it. Omni's do great ambience.

If the sound is still too direct, cup your hands behind your ear and face
the sides or the back of the room. If you find a direction that gives you
the sound you like, point a pair of directional (probably cardioid) mics
that way.

If you can't find a natural ambience you like, place a single omni out in
the "fuzziest" part of the room away from transient sources and feed that
into a reverb unit. Synthetic reverb only requires one channel of input.

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Anonymous   05-15-2005 at 02:01:26 AM
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In my opinion, you should place two cardioid mics behind the main mic, facing
left and right. The quality of SI (spatial impression) is determined primarily
by lateral reverberation, so that's what you want to record.

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Anonymous   05-15-2005 at 02:58:22 AM
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gggunnar@hotmail.com wrote:
> I want to record the ambience of a room in surround (for a 5.1 system)
> and was wondering about the best mike setup for that. Are there any
> standard techniques?

Several.

Günther Theile wrote a nice paper on his OCT technique which also covers
several others in some detail
<http://www.irt.de/IRT/FuE/as/multi-mr-ext.pdf>

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