Not long ago Jon sent me a paper written by a Rodrigo de Castro Lopes of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, regarding stereo mic technique and Lopes’ new technique dubbed simply the “Lopes Stereo Miking Technique”. The paper can be found and read here as well as a clip of some drums with this technique: http://drop.io/jklfadsoiie
I’m always one for new things, so I decided to use this technique the next time I had a drum session coming up. The drummer is Mark Gross of the band “What Monsters!”, and the mics used were 2 AKG C1000 small diaphragm condensers switched to the cardioid pattern. As a disclaimer, this was not a scientific experiment. I did my best to set up the mics and capture the source as closely to the description in the paper and diagrams included therein, but this was a 3-hour session and I needed to get drums down. Really, I just wanted to hear how it sounded, and I figure that most of you reading this likely want the same thing.
I’ve included a stereo interleaved file that has about a minute of the performance. The panning is from the engineer’s perspective, with the hi-hats on the right and the ride cymbal on the left (he’s a right handed drummer). I’m really hoping to hear some feedback about what other users think about how this sounds, as it’s really a matter of opinion.
The following are my observations:
The technique provides a nice wide coverage without a loss of center image. As expected given the distance of the mics from the sound source, it plays more towards a “room” micing technique than a “overhead” micing technique. It conforms to it’s description in the written document in that the summing in the center allows this to be a realistic stereo technique at least when applied to a drum kit. I’m not sure how well it would maintain this center image in a larger setting, such as with an orchestra as the author would like to find out. I’m glad I used the technique on this style of performance, because to me, when micing a drum kit the phase correlation is most well defined by the cymbals and how they are each captured in overhead and room mics. In a track that is very cymbal heavy it’s easy to tell how closely in phase the mics are. This became an issue with this technique, as the mics are going to naturally take in more of the cymbals that are closer to them, so when the drummer hits both at the same time it becomes apparent that the phase relationship involved is really quite fragile. Traditional room micing techniques, with the mics spaced in front of the kit have an easier time with this relationship by not focusing themselves on one side of the kit or the other as much as the Lopes technique.
As a personal conclusion, I don’t think I would use this technique in such a cymbal heavy track, but I do really like the spread achieved and think this could be really useful if you were aware of the relationship of one side of the kit to the other. I really like that there’s something new in the world of stereo micing, though I’d call this more innovation than invention.
Again, this whole article is very much a matter of opinion. Please take some time to listen to the track and let us here at AudioGeekZine know what you think.
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Sydney
