Study Hall

Supported By

How To Disappear Completely: My Year Of Working Without Corrective EQ

Creating an accurate translation of instruments for a large experience, like the PA isn’t there and the band is playing just for the fan.

Addressing The Time Element

With the advent of digital consoles, many new features have entered the mix engineer’s toolbox. One of my favorites is input channel delay. If you’ve ever aligned multiple loudspeakers in a system, you realize the importance of time alignment between components. Without properly adjusted delay times, cancelations and summations create problems that can’t be solved with EQ. The same can be true for input sources.

Now that I was running my overheads at a high level in my mix (fader at +3dB, usually) I thought about delaying the snare and tom mics to allow the waveforms to time up with the waveforms picked up by the overheads.

I’ll support this with a little math.

Imagine the stick hitting the snare drum. The snare top mic is two inches away from the drum head and the sound wave takes 0.15 milliseconds (ms) to reach it. The overheads (XY) are an additional 44 inches away from the snare mic, taking 3.26ms more for the wave to reach the mics. By adding 3.26ms of delay to the snare top mic, I effectively align the waveforms in time, reducing the problems caused by phase cancellations and summations.

I tried this and liked the results so much that I built a spreadsheet to help me calculate the delay times needed for the tom and aux snare mics too. Not a huge change, but an incremental improvement towards the perfect drum kit sound. And to make sure I can get the same results every show, I use a heavy Atlas mic stand with positions marked in silver Sharpie.

Working The Kick

The kick drum was pretty straightforward with a few exceptions. I use the common dual mic technique, with a Shure BETA 91A attached to a small pillow inside the kick drum and an Earthworks Kickpad facing away from the beater head to shape the tone. This position better balances the tone of the shell and beater. I high-pass this mic at 160Hz, using it only for attack and shell tones.

The Subkick-like transducer that helps in capturing a lower fundamental kick drum tone.

For a long time I used an Audix D6, a favorite, in the front head hole for the bottom end. But I wanted a lower fundamental drum tone without resorting to EQ.

After a few experiments, I built my own Subkick-like transducer with a resonant frequency (Fs) of 38Hz, dropping smoothly to around 80Hz and gone by 160Hz.

Combine that with the BETA 91A, which has 0.59ms of delay to compensate for the distance between the transducers, and the result is a thick, solid tone that never gets swallowed by the bass guitar or Moog keyboards.

Supported By

Celebrating over 50 years of audio excellence worldwide, Audio-Technica is a leading innovator in transducer technology, renowned for the design and manufacture of microphones, wireless microphones, headphones, mixers, and electronics for the audio industry.