Hey all, Björgvin from Audio Issues here. I got an email from Greg Abate of Neon Audio after yesterday’s email. I’ve known of him for a long time and I really respect his engineering skills so I took to heart when he voiced his concern that I was using phase and polarity interchangeably.
Which, I have to admit, I was doing.
Part of me actually doesn’t care because the tip in the video stood on its own regardless of whether I said phase or polarity….but since it’s not correct I feel the need to correct myself.
He gave me a great link to an article that I’ll share the link to in the post.([ Ссылка ])
To make a long story short what I was mostly talking about was polarity. Because I believe the “phase switch” of the Waves V-EQ basically just flips the polarity since it doesn’t actually adjust the waveform in time with anything else.
So as you know, the “phase” switch, or the Danish Ö (actually also in Norwegian and Old Norse but old norse is kind of extinct, or is today’s Icelandic but I digress….)
Anyway, the polarity reverse switch is often referred to as the phase button so obviously some confusion will arise. But with phase you have to move the waveform in time so if you wanted the kick drum for instance (going back to our original tip) to be perfectly in phase with the other microphones you would have to move the regions around.
One of the things I liked about the room mic was the thump of the kick drum. I walked around the corner of the room with one of my ears cupped so I would hear similarly to a cardioid microphone and when I found just the right thump from the kick we placed the mic there.
But if we move the region so that the waveform is “in phase” meaning that the waveform arrives at the same time in both regions (even though the mics are far apart, that’s why you move them). the sound changes a lot too. And now combine that with the polarity switch on the kick drum and you’ll have a lot of different chooses depending on the sound you’re looking for.
The moved room makes the snare sound different. Flipping the polarity on the kicks also does different things now.
So what’s the tip here? Not sure, but know that you can get drastically different sounds out of a multi-miked instrument depending on a) where you place the mics to begin with, b) what you do with the polarity switch on your tracks and c) if you want to move regions around to get better phase consistency throughout your tracks.
