MS recording for upcoming session?

[twitchmonitor]

I?ve got a session coming up with a Don Caballero-type band. I?m recording the drums in a very nice drum room, going for a nice, roomy sound. I?m going to close mic the snare, kick, and both toms with mics 3-4 inches off the skins?but I want to try something a little different for the overheads/room. I?ve head luck with the Albini room mics move (two (earthworks, in my case) on the floor, 6? or so apart, both pointing at the kick, delayed 20 ms or so).

For the OH, I?m thinking of doing an MS thing in front and a mono overhead to capture some more direct sound of the snare. For the MS I?m considering using a Neumann 47 Fet and a U87 in figure 8. For the overhead I?m planning on dangling a B.L.U.E lollipop mic above the kit somewhere. Do you guys think this would be a reasonable setup? How do I decode the MS using PT?

[Red Rockets Glare]

you can get MS on pro tools by making a duplicate Side mic track and flipping the phase.
I'm loving this sound lately.

[twitchmonitor]

you can get MS on pro tools by making a duplicate Side mic track and flipping the phase.
I'm loving this sound lately.

Hm. I was hoping I could hear it before committing it to disk, you know? I guess I could mult the side mic and flip the phase on one channel, eh? Isn't there a decoder or some such device out there? Or one IN PT, perhaps? Odd that you'd have to do it after the fact, you know?

And what do you think of the mic choice? I've used the 47 in front of the kit before and it sounded pretty damn good, but I'm not sure how good the whole thing will sound with the 87 involved. Good match?

[KennyLusk]

If you haven't already, you might want to check these out. They actually have a very useful sound but they're on backorder. I ordered one yesterday and they said it would be about 2 weeks before they could ship. It won't do you any good right away but I've been so much into acheiving a proper MS sound lately that I broke down and bought one of these.

http://www.paia.com/msmic.htm

[soundguy]

the easiest thing to do is decode it at the console and record it XY into PT. Mult the fig 8, flip the phase on one, pan them LR and bring them up around the 47 panned at 12. I had to deal with MS tracks in PT LE a few weeks ago, did the decoding in PT by using that method and the results were horrid. My well known opinions about PT aside, PT LE CAN NOT decode MS like that, it just sounds like shit. This wasnt a figment of my imagination either, four engineers scratching our heads listening to it... There are a few active decoders you can buy, AEA makes a good one, neve used to make one (33608a), lots of portable mixers for the film biz have them, they all sound different. The AEA is pretty good, its kinda pricey for what it is though. No shame in using three channels on the console.

dave

[ValveTone Mastering]

the easiest thing to do is decode it at the console and record it XY into PT. Mult the fig 8, flip the phase on one, pan them LR and bring them up around the 47 panned at 12. I had to deal with MS tracks in PT LE a few weeks ago, did the decoding in PT by using that method and the results were horrid. My well known opinions about PT aside, PT LE CAN NOT decode MS like that, it just sounds like shit. This wasnt a figment of my imagination either, four engineers scratching our heads listening to it... There are a few active decoders you can buy, AEA makes a good one, neve used to make one (33608a), lots of portable mixers for the film biz have them, they all sound different. The AEA is pretty good, its kinda pricey for what it is though. No shame in using three channels on the console.

dave

Hmmm, I've decoded this way in LE lots of times. Strange. As long as you have the same plugs on both the S channels to keep latency the same, it's all good.

That said, Waves has an MS decoder as part of one of their stereo enhancer plugs if I am not mistaken.

MS is a fabulous technique BTW if you haven't used it; it's quite a thrill the first time you realize you have both hands on control of the stereo width AND know you can also control your mono compatibility completely.

Damon

[soundguy]

hi damon-

at the risk of sounding really condescending, have you ever used a really good decoder?

I was at a radio station and was able to replicate the same shitty sound on two different stations, both were running LE, I would hope that a HD system wouldnt be the same bullshit. No plugins at all were engaged. We just loaded the tracks in and tried to listen to them XY that way, NOGO. But you know, protools will someday be great when they fix it.

dave

[ValveTone Mastering]

Sure, I've used quality decoders (both film gear varieties, Schoeps, etc) and have certainly manually decoded it on a board with the standard mult approach dozens of times.

It's a straight forward process; it shouldn't have a "sound" at all as far as I know. As long as the pan and phase inversion functions are well implemented.

I use MS encoding and decoding often for mastering, in software and hardware (mult and phase flip), like a lot of MEs, with no issues either way.

Perhaps in the analog decoders you've heard there is something (like imperfect phase inversion) that you like or respond to? Or some non-linearity in the signal path?

Oh well, time for another ABX listening test I guess!

Damon

[soundguy]

there shouldnt be a "sound" with an MS decoder, but any active decoder is going to impart whatever tonal qualities the inverting opamp has and then whatever color the active buffer or transformer has on the signal. Shouldnt come as any suprise that a Neve MS decoder sounds waaay different than if you were use the decoder in a soundevices mixer with lundahl transformers or a cooper mixer with jensen transformers or just used two transformers to do it passively or used the AEA box which is electronically buffered and uses IC's throughout. All that stuff sounds very different and while Im certainly pulling this next bit out of my ass, Im willing to bet that the slewing of the inverting opamp in an active decoder likely has some impact on the phase coherency of the stereo XY image at thhe end of the day. Ive been known to pull all sorts of bullshit out of my ass though...

As for PT, I wrote that off as PT LE at its best, but whatever the problem was, yielded unusable results.

dave

[ValveTone Mastering]

I agree with you totally and of course each of those boxes has a "fingerprint"; like I said, I bet you responded to the non-linearities of various components at play in the analog process. That's why I love analog so much! Character baby, character.

Truthfully, most of my MS decoding for mixing and monitoring while tracking has been some variety of an analog method.

When mastering, I usually prefer a pure-play encoding-decoding to allow me the most control during the rest of my analog chain.

Have you tried the same trick with other software?

D