Last week I had a rehearsal for an upcoming show. I thought this would be a nice opportunity to set up a quick Blumlein stereo pair and catch our group in the room. This technique captures sound fairly equally from all directions in a deep, stereo arrangement. Here I have the drums positioned to the front of the array and the bass aimed at the rear of the array.

We needed to focus on rehearsal and not micing up stuff, and since I’m playing bass, I didn’t have the liberty of dialing in everything in the mics. The bass ended up being off center and the array should have been way closer to the kit for balance. As you can see, these are not a matched pair of mics. For such a casual recording, I wasn’t particularly concerned with that. The setup intentionally had the guitar off to the side; with this approach, mixing is done in the room, into the mic.

As you can see, I had another vocal mic set up, which ended up picking up too much guitar and really wasn’t useable. I later put an AKG d1000e directly on the Bugera, and panned opposite of the guitar in the blumlein pair helped center the guitar in the mix. (although at this point the drums were completely buried.) I didn’t bother asking our guitarist to turn down or try to move the amp, since time was limited and this was an experiment on my part.

The live room you see here is at Warehouse Studios in Jacksonville, Fl. Its 27′ x 27.5′ x 12′ with some V shaped diffusers built on a few walls, a drop ceiling and some kind of treatment over cinder block walls. It is certainly an improvement over most smaller practice spaces. It seems fairly dead for what I’m used to, but I’m new to recording in this room and haven’t got the strongest feel for it yet. It did lend itself well to this approach and I look forward to taking a deeper dive into this technique in the future!