[Music] I'm Philip Graham with Ear Trumpet Labs microphones. We're here at the IBMA World of Bluegrass, and with help of D'Addario and the fabulous Man About a Horse, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the best techniques for making a bluegrass band and specifically how to get beyond the five-up five-down standard line-up approach. We'll talk a little bit about that and the differences between the kinds of microphones that you kind of need for different approaches, and something about, with the help of the band, how to best address the mic and how to practice and how to get used to doing a more dynamic performance style. When you first go to perform live in a place that's doing sound reinforcement you're probably going to run into a bunch of dynamic microphones all lined up, usually one for your vocal and one for your for your instrument and what you'll usually be told is "Get right up on that mic, you have to get as close as you can". With dynamic mics, that's true– one of the main differences between dynamics and condensers is that dynamic mics are really designed for very close use and the tone really only sounds decent if you are very close on them and as soon as you get a few inches away from the microphone, the tone is going to change drastically so you really do have to perform sort of pinned in place to the microphone. One of the advantages of using condenser mics and going to a single mic or fewer microphone setup is that it can really free up your performance, both your individual ability to perform more naturally and as band to add a little more dynamic and dance to what you do. The other real advantages are that acoustically it is just gonna sound more natural. It's gonna sound more like your instrument and your band sounds in a room from somebody just sitting there right in front of you. You know, a condenser mic is the kind of mic that's used in the studio, it has more detail, it will get the subtlety of your instrument much better. That said, there are some challenges, some real challenges to learning to work a single mic effectively as a band. [laughs] These guys well know, and they've been practicing at it for quite a while. They're very good. You know, it's on the one hand a more natural performance approach, I guess, right? I mean it does feel a little more like playing knee-to-knee when you're learning tunes or when you're sitting around jamming: that part of it is great, but in reality to get a decent amount of volume out front you do have to be real conscious of the distance that you have to your single mic, and that can really take some practice when you've got five strapping lads and all their instruments and head stocks and fiddle bows. I was hoping maybe you guys can talk a little bit about the process of figuring out how you address the one mic and practice at it. Dan Whitener (banjo): Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it is knowing what the mic does and doesn't do, so you know this one, if it has a little bit of a different cardioid shape pick-up pattern and a little bit of a different range, you know you want to be within that. One trick that we use for this sort of thing is if you have the you have a standard three leg tripod mic stand and the legs go out to sixty degrees either side, and you have a set like this, it's a pretty good visual representation of you could be maybe about so over here and as far out as to over here so if we leaned in and did like a three-part harmony thing then you'd be able to actually get everybody as long as we're pretty much within that range and you know still you got to get a little bit close. It's it's kind of fun because there's a natural element but then there's also you know it encourages us to heighten our performative aspect so it's not enough to just stand close to each other there's also got to be a little bit of choreography. So let's say I'm singing a lead, I'm gonna have to lean in enough to make it obvious, I'd have to play into it enough to make it obvious, but that's ultimately going to be more helpful to our performance. I mean it takes a little bit to get used to, but when you think about doing that sort of thing it just it helps the audience because the audience are listening visually too. They're like "Okay but who's who's doing what? I don't know the difference between a banjo sound, a mandolin sound, okay but *he's* playing because he just stepped all the way up so the microphone like that." And it just makes it all a little bit more fun and easier for us because then we can also tell, I'm taking a solo, somebody else is going to be playing backup, and everything just gets a little bit more dynamic in the way that we play. Yeah, I mean it's not just on or off, as you move out of the pattern you get quieter. One of the things that was striking to us was when we were in sort of learning how to do this, one of the techniques we did was we would wear headphones in real time as we were standing around the mic playing it, and it was really striking when you got right in the sweet spot of the mic: you could be fairly far back. I think he was singing some harmony vocals, and it was like we had to realize he'd have to really back off to mix himself so that he's not overpowering everybody else because he's right in the sweet spot of that mic. I think if you put headphones on it really sort of opens up your eyes to what changes happen as you move around in the pattern on the microphone. I definitely recommend people trying that if they're going to try to learn how to use one mic. Absolutely, yeah, I have to give credit to Michael Daves for that too, because I read an interview with him in a magazine, he had made that suggestion, so that's where we got the idea, I gotta tip my hat to him for that. Excellent! So in going about choosing the placement of the mic, I mean it's a pretty simple choice. You're really just figuring out the right height placement. I mean I usually suggest initially just think about kind of drawing a line... get everybody in basically as as close as they would be for a uniform circle, and just sort of draw an imaginary line to every sound source and try and get it as placed as centrally as possible and with a big band that's probably the best thing. As you get into duets, you know you may find that it benefits shading it up or down you know depending on you know the volume of individual instruments and different singers voices and things like that. Absolutely, I think that's a great starting point is to just find an equal distance from everything. You know, look at people's heights, the height of your mouth, the height of your instrument– the loud part of it– and then it's counterintuitive because of course you always want the vocals to come through clearly, but with but with a group like this we're all we sing pretty strong and actually sometimes we've heard maybe with the softer instruments like guitar you know if we ask somebody out in the audience how's it sound— you should always listen when people say stuff like "That's good... you know... I could hear the guitar a little bit more... it would be nice if I could..." so there's not a lot the sound guy can, we gotta do it with the microphone, so unless he's gonna do the Johnny Cash thing and play the guitar way up there, it actually helps us to lower it down a little bit lower than equidistant because our voices are still going to come through, we're pretty strong singers. Philip: I find that people tend to place it higher than they should. Part of it is just you're used to thinking of a mic right in front of your face and used to a mic for vocals. The other thing to really keep in mind as you think about the pattern, as you had talked about, is that it's three-dimensional. I always sort of think of it as a big balloon, like a like an air bag. Picture that as a steering wheel and like the airbag has blown out here. It's as generous vertically as it is horizontally. Matt Thomas (bass): Yeah, that's key, exactly what you said. Your instinct is like oh, there's the capsule I need to speak or sing directly into that, and that's not how these microphones work. You just have to be in that bubble, so you can talk over it and it's fine, you can talk under it and it's fine, it doesn't matter. Dan: I think a great example of that is when you do like a wedding gig or something and you have your mic set up and the MC or some maid of honor, special guest, wants to come up and just you know [shout] right into and you just see it you see it coming, you know, you can't train everybody. It's a good performance technique. I have to remind myself sometimes: don't hunch over! The mic is gonna be a little bit lower. You kind of want to sing over the top of it to make sure that you're looking out at the audience that's there to see you perform and not have your head down or even hunching over. It's a nice looking mic, but you don't want it you know blocking your face, right? If it's at this height, people can still see you. Aesthetically, that helps too.
Philip: Especially if we're getting a 4-piece or more band in around the mic, you should probably have something else on the bass. A DI if you have one, or we have a mic that mounts on the bass [Ear Trumpet Labs Nadine], but it's really gonna make it a lot easier to do that choreography and get around the mic if you're not worrying about trying to get the bass instrument in there. You lean in on the vocals and that's fine, you just have to poke your head in over a couple of shoulders, but yeah, it's a lot easier if you're not trying to get the full bass sound into the mic. You will usually find that there is a bunch of the tone and the sound of the bass coming through here, so you know it can be fine to use a DI just to add a punch and volume to that. But you know, some of the strings sound...
Matt: If I'm trying to play like this, mmm, that's taking up a lot of real estate.
Philip: As I say, these guys have a lot of practice at doing the single mic thing, I know they've done some some specific single mic band competitions, and I would love to see a little demonstration, if you could? Maybe showing some of the ways that we sort of take solos and work it as a band. All right, take it away, guys!
Dan: Let's start from the first verse, I think, go through the chorus and some solos. [Music] Once I was waiting in fortune and fame / everything that I needed to get a start in life's game / Then suddenly it happened, I lost every dime / But I'm richer by far with a satisfied mind How many times have you heard someone say / if I had his money, I could do things my way / But little they know that it's so hard to fine / One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind. [Music] Philip: Wonderful, thank you! So before we move on to some slightly more elaborate setups that we can do, I want to talk a little bit about about ways to get the most volume out of out of the mic. I'm sure you guys find yourselves in a whole bunch of different acoustic situations, many of them not ideal, as is all too common for a lot of bands. What I usually find is that the biggest danger from feedback when you're doing this kind of distance miking is actually coming from reflections from behind you in the space. The rejection off the back of the mic is generally going to be pretty good but that's the thing to be most aware of and most careful about. You may or may not have a lot of control over that in any environment that you're in, but any chance that you have to soften the surface behind you— you know, pull drapes, certainly if it's a big plate glass window, if you have a chance to pull drapes, do it. Some bands will even travel with a quilt or a drape or something like that that they can hang up behind them in in difficult situations. You can often get some monitoring. I don't know how often you guys do, and you know you you're really just looking for a little bit to give you a sense of your own balance and volume, but you shouldn't be afraid for at least trying to bring up a little a little monitoring. Again that's probably not gonna be directly the cause of feedback, but it may bounce back if it's a really terrible room, that may be a little bit of an issue, but go ahead and try and get some some monitoring when you're using it live. Matt Royles (guitar): I mean one of the advantages of this set up of course is that we can hear ourselves acoustically as opposed to the five-up we were talking about where it's just coming out of the monitors, and we have to rely on that to hear each other. Here we're just hearing ourselves, which is I mean the way we prefer to play anyways, so you don't need as much monitor. Dan: Yeah, it's a great starting point I think in good situations, and even some of the bad situations where the room is really loud and you're hearing a lot, maybe the silver lining with that is that you learn to hear everything. You get used to hearing what the mains sound like, hearing what the room sounds like, and just using everything as your monitor so even if you don't get a whole lot out of that, you know, the mains can be can be kind of comforting to have that kind of presence, and hear what the audience is hearing. In some rooms it's just, it's really ideal, it's really just out of this world to get just a little bit of support, but it just sounds like we're playing, you know, just louder. Philip: Yeah, that should be the ideal! Eric Lee (fiddle): And it's also helpful to kind of give the whole band of focus of what's going on directly in the center, you know sort of the invisible audience member, well... Philip: Imaginary audience member with with a big hairdo Eric: You know, as far as not even taking solo breaks, you know you're filling and you have something to say, it gives you a presence mm-hmm or if you're just doing some backup stuff but you're not really making a statement with it, you can stay in the distance. It gives a good focal point! If you have your own monitor mix and an individual mic, that's all great, but sometimes it can be a little isolating and you kind of be in your own zone, whereas this kind of helps with the group to stay focused in one space. Philip: Yeah, I mean as I was thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of this style of playing, one of the real advantages is you're controlling the mix entirely. You're not dependent on anybody else. Dan: Well, you have to have a good relationship with the sound engineer, and they have to know what they're doing with this kind of microphone. Philip: Yes. Dan: And if they don't, I think there are a few things that we've learned to say. One is "Okay... maybe we're not gonna use it this time." [laughs] But, no, there are a lot of ways we can make it work. You want to obviously not let the gain get too high. They're gonna want to bring the gain up a whole lot. If you can do that, you can ring out the room and remove some key frequencies, that's great, but if you can't then just keep the gain low and accept that we might not be the loudest band that plays that night, but we are gonna sound good. Matt: Another thing that just occurred to me in terms of controlling the mix is that when Bill Monroe put together this lineup of instruments, there's something about this lineup. Dan mentioned for example the guitar is a little bit quieter, and when you play acoustically that sort of mix just sort of happens because this is a quieter instrument. When you're maybe plugging in your guitar at a rock club to play bluegrass, the sound engineer who might not be as familiar with bluegrass might turn the guitar way up and have it overwhelming everything else in the band, and then when I hear back a recording of our show I go, oh well you know... that's what we sounded like in the house. So here it sort of like, this is acoustic music, and so it's great to represent it that way through the microphone. Philip: We do find some times, I know you guys find and with a lot of bands, that the single mic can be a challenge and in certain rooms you really may be having trouble getting enough straight volume out of it, and it's also it's sort of one particular dance then you do and although it's interesting, sometimes it can help to add another mic or two.There's a couple of different reasons that you can do that: one is if you really do need that to sort of help boost the volume particularly on one or two instruments. It's fairly common to have a spot a fill mic on the guitar. It can also help just to have it there as an extra place to sort of step up for solos or for a couple of the instruments (typically guitar, mandolin) to be able to be in there and in the mix, still adjusting your balance, but not having to crowd everything around the one microphone. So with that said, I think we're gonna bring in a mic or two. As we talk about this now we're into addressing a mic to an individual instrument, and there are some things, some pointers about the appropriate placement of a microphone on individual acoustic instruments that I thought we might talk about a little bit. Typically if you're bringing in another mic there's a bunch of different ones that you could use. Edwina is ours, it's a large diaphragm. Typically you would tend to use pencil mic small diaphragm condensers are pretty common to see in this setup. The Edwina behaves a lot like one of those and actually for our other fill mic we have a small diaphragm, but you'll see that the placement and the address of it is basically the same. When you're making a single instrument one of the things to keep in mind as an ideal distance off an instrument, you really do want to give it some space. Part of the point, we're walking a balance here, because part of the point is to be able to close mic the instrument to get a little more volume out of it, but at the same time the closer you get to an instrument the less natural sounding it's gonna be. You're hearing a smaller and smaller part of the resonating face of the instrument. There's a sort of general rule of thumb which is to sort of get the most natural sound out of an instrument you want to mic from as far away as the as the size of the resonating body. So on a banjo you know ideally your mic would be as far away as about the size of the head, 11 inches. On a guitar ideally you would be a good 16 inches off of it. That can be hard to do you know, that's probably about the distance that you're working when when your central micing. We could maybe illustrate a little bit... guitar is maybe the maybe the trickiest and the one that people get wrong the most often, because people tend to go for the sound hole, and the sound hole is a weird resonating part of the instrument. You're getting very odd frequencies there, so typically I start off right about where the neck and the body join. That's kind of where you wanna mic it and with the microphone pointed down angling towards the body of the instrument. You really do want to stay at about that 12th fret, 14th fret position. On mandolin and banjo, they're a little less sensitive to that but usually if you have a choice I usually come in from just sort of behind the bridge and below it a little bit. [Music] Yeah, and the mandolin similarly usually kind of off of the face but behind the bridge is usually usually a good spot. [Music] Fiddle is a bit of a different beast: if you are gonna have an individual mic on the on a fiddle, we can illustrate this a little bit. I find I usually find that actually a little bit above but pretty much in front is a pretty good spot. Some people really like to come straight down on the top of the instrument, but I think we're for the most part as an audience member we're used to hearing it projecting out front and I think it actually radiates a little more naturally. The sound seems a little more true. [Music] Alright, so when you guys are doing your preferred setup at this point would be a central mic with a couple of of fill mics. So do want to talk a little bit about how you sort of how you choose what to what to play in each and and where you go about placing it? Dan: I think a lot of it depends on room size, you know sort of basic rule for like a number of people who are trying to hear you, so you know how hot is the amplification gonna need to go. Sometimes you get into a space and just acoustically you can look around and just feel how sound's bouncing around in there and you know it's gonna change a little bit with people because soundcheck is an empty room, but you can get a pretty good sense. Most of the time we'll look at each other, we'll come into a room and we'll say "this is this is probably a one mic setup." I think we could try more but but if we don't need it, obviously we don't want to go to the effort of setting everything up. And then other places, it's a little bit bigger it might be a little bit louder of room, okay, or it let's say the stage is less of a box and more of a row, so then we don't really have the luxury of standing around it in a deep semicircle, so we're gonna have to spread out and that way we really have to distribute the mics out a little bit wider. So it's partially that: the shape of the stage, the size of the room, how loud we need to get, how close to the mics we might have to get. Matt: I think if we're gonna do a central mic and two spot mics, most commonly I think we'll have the banjo and mandolin sharing a microphone and then we'll have one on the guitar as you mentioned earlier cuz it's a little bit quieter instrument if you have three microphones. If we add more we can get crazy. [Dan] If the vocal mic is high, enough the fiddle can still play into it comfortably, and it's nice. It's nice to still share some of these mics because if it's not one microphone for everybody but you still get some of that dynamic trading and playing together. Even when you have DIs, even if you're plugging in and using pickups, we'll still like to set up some of these microphones even in the loudest rooms because we still get that effect, we still get a little bit of boost over our pickup sound, so you're still getting a little bit of natural sound. It's not gonna sound totally natural anymore because it's plugged in but that's a lot a large part of what we do is playing to any room, to any setup, and it retains some of that realness and we still get to play with each other and trade solos physically and look at each other. [Philip] So how would you want to set up right now in here? [Dan] With just the one fill mic I think yeah we'd put it off to the side enough so that there's room to get to it and we could you know we could bring both in and I think probably with the with the ideal setup we might end up needing both. Let's just use these two and check that out. One... two... [Music] [Music]
[Music]
There's still choreography, it's just new choreography!
[Philip] How much do you guys rehearse every song with different setups, or how much of this are you kind of winging with with each setup? 100% winging it. [Matt] Sort of! We did some band competitions and in that situation we definitely spent time thinking about what is the ideal setup for this song. We would move things around for the for those songs, but I think in general we have sort of a toolkit of skills of knowing how to work with these microphones. We'll switch it up, we'll do things differently and experiment and that's fun to even just to sort of mess around and see what works. You know, these microphones are instruments and learning to use them it's not like we have a choreographed routine that we do exactly the same, but it's like you know about where you need to be for it to sound right. Let's face it it's entertaining to watch and see if somebody's gonna get hit in the head with a headstock. Bloodsport! [laughs] [Philip] Fantastic, alright well let's bring one more mic. This one is a small diaphragm, similar acoustically to a pencil mic condenser, but the main difference is that our design is side address instead of pencil address, but the same rules about placement would apply with this one. [Matthew Hilter - mandolin] Typically we have that stage right mic a little farther away. It's kind of a banjo or guitar mic depending on who's where, and this is kind of a mandolin or guitar mic, and fiddle is gonna sneak into that hole.
[Music]
[Philip]  Man About a Horse! Thank you guys! [Music]