Flyer for the event.
Andrew Monheim began the presentation with a little bit of his background, and how he got to where he is now in his career. He graduated from CRAS in 2007, and went on to an internship in LA. After a few years he moved into manufacturing, he was interested in how the gear he frequently uses worked. He got in contact with Greg from internship here at the conservatory, and ended up landing an interview with Blue Microphones. He went from an entry level position, taking phone calls, and running small errands to running production of Blue Microphones within a year. He ran production and services for Blue Microphones for two years. He got to learn a lot about the microphone industry, he worked in direct contact with the manufacturing.
Andrew then moved on to explaining how our ears are the best Omni directional microphones, we hear sound with two omni directional ears. Spy microphones are omni directional microphones in a room, many people refer to those like having an ear in the room.
He told us a story about how a couple years ago he purchased a 1968 Rodgers Drum Kit, and tried recording it in his home studio. He spent 3 months recording this drum kit off and on, trying to get the stylistic sound of this kit from the 60s and 70s. He tried many different microphones, and miking techniques. He finally tried omni microphones, he ended up using 4 mics for the entire room. one kick, one overhead, one direct center for the image, and one set back in the room. And that's what got him this unbelievable sound he'd sought after. Since then, he manufactured his own omni directional microphone.
He was very passionate about omni microphones. He explained bit about how our ears work, and that we don't hear with a flat frequency response. He designed his mic to have a frequency bump around 10k, he focused on the capsule of his mic, he wanted to create a natural sounding mic. The elevation in 10k changes the mid range frequencies. Our gut reaction to music comes from the mid range frequencies.
After we finished the presentation portion of the evening, he was super excited to let us hear his microphone. We started out with Mitch playing a 12 string acoustic guitar. We formed a line and everyone came up to listen to the guitar with our ears, acoustically, we listened to the guitar's full waveform propagation by moving our head back and forth to hear the raw guitar.
We used the average point in where we thought was the best listening point, to place the omni microphones where our ears would normally be positioned.
Andrew then explained how everyone has a different sized timpani membranes, the surface of our ears where we hear, basically our frequency response. So how we all perceive the sound of the guitar is going to be a little different. We used our ears a lot to try and get a feel for what exactly we're recording, and using the omni microphones to achieve an accurate and true sound. The sound we got out of the two omni microphones was very realistic to what we experienced when we listened to the acoustic guitar live.
We then listened to Fletch play a cajon, a very contained instrument, we moved our physical ears and listened to it acoustically to see where we'd like to set our omni microphones. And then did the same exercise in listening to the microphones through headphones, after the placement.
We positioned the microphones offset to put the cajon in a stereo position, a stylistic choice. Monheim explained how important accurate and spacial recordings are. Lots of people can record a safe/clean instrument, but if you're international with your microphones placement, and you know what you're doing, you can come up with some crazy cool sounds.
He also mentioned how you can add physical delay when you record it by using placement of microphones. He reiterated, that we all have the most valuable omni microphones, our ears, and that we should experiment to see where you want to place your microphones to best emulate the physical placement of your ears.
We then put the omni microphones on an amplifier, while playing electric guitar, and listened to the difference when we moved isolation walls back and forth to listen to the difference in the sound that the microphones pick up, being omni directional we could hear the difference in more low end, everyone heard subtle differences.
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