"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" - One take stereo, vocal & guitar

[hooper]

This is a stereo mic that I built recently.  Total cost less than $5US.
The mics are little omni-directional capsules (Panasonic WM-61A) assembled as in the excellent article on this site written by Pedro:  http://microrecorders.org/articles/diy_electret_microbr_microphone.html

Then the mics were mounted on a homemade Jecklin disk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jecklin_Disk

The concept is that the disk provides some acoustic separation between the two mics, basically dividing the soundscape into two hemispheres.  Normally a Jecklin disk is oriented vertically which divides the soundscape into a Left and Right hemisphere. In this experiment I oriented the disk horizontally (using an old tennis racket as a holder) which hopefully divides the soundscape into two hemispheres, Upper and Lower.  The idea is that a guitar player can sit close to the disk in such a way that there will be mic separation between the vocal sound source above the disk and the guitar sound source below the disk.  The setup produces pretty good separation and I end up with the main vocal and guitar on separate tracks and can then set separate pans, levels, reverb.  In the sound sample below (thanks for the loan of the song, Mr. Lennon) I actually re-panned the stereo field to more narrow than the raw tracks.

"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"
(Lennon/McCartney)

[Pedro]

That is great!

Besides the very good performance, that is a very interesting setup you've come up with. I've been thinking for some time now how to do that, stereo separation in one take, especially for recording guitar and vocals and that is exactly what I was looking for. I might just build one with an old tennis racket like yours. But using the tennis racket as a jecklin disk.

Good work, thanks for sharing your setup!

[guitarron]

They sound good-quiet too
i wonder if i can pick up a couple Panasonic WM-61A at the local Radio Shack?

[hooper]

Thanks, Pedro.  Yeah, I guess if you use a tennis racket for the Jecklin disk... then you would have a disk with a handle on it.  Could be useful for holding it up above the crowd at concerts!   
The disk itself does need to be something pretty dense (I used 3/4" plywood) with a non-reflective material on the faces (I glued on rubber-backed carpet).

Ron, I'd be surprised if you could find these capsules at Rat Shack.
You can order them from Digi-Key here:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=P9925-ND
They cost $1.86 each or 10 for 1.65 each. I went ahead and ordered 10 because there is great risk of frying the capsule when soldering. They are so tiny. Not quite as big as a 81mg baby asprin. You'll need a soldering iron with a very small tip. 

[Blooby]

Hooper, this really sounds outstanding.  A naked tune like this displays all the guts I wish I had.  Hell, I don't even know if I can sing since I rarely listen back when I try.  

I'm curious how much of this was natural reverb vs. the BR.  My one complaint with the unit is that long reverbs start to get "choppy" for lack of a better term, but your vocal reverb sounds rather lush.

Excellent.

Blooby

[hooper]

Thanks, Blooby.  And yes, I wish I could sing too.
The reverb on this is all BR.  It's the Room reverb rather than the Hall... with the reverb Delay adjusted a little and the Tone punched up to +7.

You also mentioned 'Delay' effect, (and you're right, most of the M-BR presets for Delay are pretty long)  Maybe this will help:  It will usually sound better if you adjust the Delay time to repeat in sync with the Beats Per Minute of the song.  You can get to the screen for changing the preset repeat time of the Delay by pressing: Effects|EDT|curser>|DLY|curser>|curser>

Then, get out a calculator. 
60,000 (milliseconds per minute) divided by your tempo (Beats per Minute) equals the quarter note value for each repeat.  So, if the tempo of your song is 110 BPM then:
60,000/110 = 545ms.

However, an echo on each quarter note beat will be too long of a delay for most songs.  So, divide it by 2 to get the eighth note value and see how that sounds:
545ms /2 = 272ms
Still too long? Divide by 2 again and get the sixteenth note value
272ms /2 = 136ms.

Seems like a eighth or sixteenth note delay is usually the one that we're looking for so I usually start out with 60,000/BPM/4 to save a step.

Try it, you'll like it.

[PhilFromIT]

Awesome recording Hooper! I'll have to see if I can make one of these as I still have 2 capsules left. Also, thanks for the info on the delay calculations. I never thought about it that way before.

-Phil

[Blooby]

You also mentioned 'Delay' effect.

Yikes!  I misspoke before (and corrected my last post).  I meant to say that the long reverbs (not delays) of the BR sound choppy to me.

As for synching effects to the rhythm, I do it often.  I'm especially fond of tremolo sitting in time to the rhythm.

Once again, nice recording.

Blooby

[SteveG]

The only fault I can find with this is that it finished just as I wsa really getting in to it  Wish you could sing ... yeah ... right! All sounds great mate, that mike setup works real well.

[Indiana]

Seems like a eighth or sixteenth note delay is usually the one that we're looking for so I usually start out with 60,000/BPS/4 to save a step.

Would that last calc be 60,000/BPM/4 (instead of BPS). Or maybe I didn't follow something.

Thanks for explaining about delay setting.
rod