The sound of gray

[biasvoltage]

I read in here over and over again about using a "bright" sounding mic on "dull" sounding sources and "dark" sounding mics on "bright" sources. Or a tube pre to warm up a cold synth track. Are we* just trying to achieve gray?

In film photography, if you use a light meter on a white snowy field it will tell you to close the iris down. If you use the same light meter on a black cat it will tell you to open the iris up. The end result, either way, is gray.


Man I need some coffee. Or some sleep.

[No Wave Casio Kitsch]

That's good.

[RefD]

i've heard some pretty damned bright-sounding tube gear, too.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

funny, just the other day i was telling garges that i think mackies sound gray...

[AstroSounds]

I've only recently been able to apply these principles and maybe it's the novelty, but I've been enjoying the results of combining say a bright source with a slightly dark mic and then a crisp sounding preamp.

I don't think we're just making gray. I have bit of trouble with your analogy though because it's not just that you're trying to capture an image of snow or a black cat. I feel that so few sound sources are that "monochromatic". At the very least the cat is callico and the snow has been peed upon a few times.

So maybe the dark preamp is deemphasizing the pee color so that when we finally put the picture(s) together people see a beautiful snowy landscape and don't ask "Is that pee?"

[jgimbel]

I think about this kind of thing a lot. I'm a graphic designer and photographer along with the music thing, and I'm constantly finding similarities between them. I think it's not about finding gray (partially because of the connotations gray has), but it's about finding balance. In art terms it's the same way that composition works - you could ask "why are we looking to balance all the elements?". I rarely ever, ever like symmetry, I LOVE negative space, but I also place a lot of importance in balance. If I have a white square/canvas/whatever, and I put a big, gray dot toward the right side, slightly above the middle, it makes sense to me to put a dark-as-possible really small black dot down at the bottom left corner slightly in from the right. It's aesthetics/beauty that makes us do that a certain way.

So I think with recording, it just relates as balance. I know the reason I personally will use a bright mic on a dark source or vice versa is because I tend to like sounds that are as natural/realistic as I can get them. If I record my mountain dulcimer with a somewhat flat mic or a bright mic, that pushes the recording into the territory of not sounding realistic. But If I counteract the fact that it's easy to record a dulcimer as bright by using a dark mic, it is represented a bit closer to how I'm actually hearing it in the room.

[thethingwiththestuff]

Are we* just trying to achieve gray?

no, we're trying to achieve the sound we hear in our heads, make things fit together, and de-emphasize the parts of instruments that aren't necessary to get the point across on record.

[@?,*???&?]

I read in here over and over again about using a "bright" sounding mic on "dull" sounding sources and "dark" sounding mics on "bright" sources. Or a tube pre to warm up a cold synth track. Are we* just trying to achieve gray?

No, because Gray is the sound of the SSL mic pre amps.

In these color judgments, much of the description can have to with transients as well as frequency response. We make three basic decisions when choosing which mic to use:

*Polar Pattern which may or may not be dictated by operation principle (i.e. condenser, dynamic, ribbon, etc.)

*Frequency response which may or may not be dictated by operation principle (i.e. condenser, dynamic, ribbon, etc.)

*Transient response which may or may not be dictated by operation principle (i.e. condenser, dynamic, ribbon, etc.)

There are a few others, but these are the *core* concepts.

Frequency response and transient response comes more in to play when we start talking about pre-amps. With electronic components, slew rate becomes an important term too.

[dsw]

Light blue on top and dark orange to brown on the bottom.

[rhythm ranch]

Light blue on top and dark orange to brown on the bottom.

[@?,*???&?]

Light blue on top and dark orange to brown on the bottom.

God I hate Rothko...I'm certainly glad he didn't create any mic pres!

[rhythm ranch]

God I hate Rothko.

Why am I not surprised?

[MoreSpaceEcho]

i always liked this one:



just lovely.

[blackdiscoball]

This reminds me about this joke this band and I had about how "reverb was the gause and blur of life" (referring to the photoshop tools)

[mjau]

I like Rothko.
I try to use mics that compliment the good parts of a source, while not exaggerating the parts I don't want as prominent.
Which pretty much means I use my sm7 a lot.