a trick my friend told me about that blows my mind: recording your kick mic onto multiple tracks. i run 2 mics in my kick drum, a D112 and Sterling Audio ST55 LDC. i recorded the st55 to three separate tracks all with the same input. the kick drum is so much more present in the mix. but i dont get it tho! is it the 3 db rule? if it's just 3db louder for each track i add why cant i accomplish the same thing with gain? my kick sounds better than ever...
You're just making it louder. You drop an identical signal on top of an identical signal, all you're doing is making it louder.
I guess it's a workflow thing and also makes you less afraid of turning 1 fader all the way up (everyone mixes with the eyes to some point). Also EQing the separate tracks differently may offer interesting results.
The mother of all phase problems is what it'll give you. Actually, thinking about that. Maybe the OP is using different pres, that would create phase differences which might be doing some eq work
On a source that doesn't vary a lot tonally (like the kick) I can picture phase fuckery working well in some circumstances. It's not like with guitars where you end up with earraping chainsaw massacre stuff. Think of push-pull eqing. I use that all the time. Isn't that the same thing?
yup, only reason that makes sense to use three different inputs of the same mic track is if you are comparing different signalchains. But only use one of them at a time in a mix. Using 2-3 mics is a whole different story and totally acceptable.
yeah but its not the same as adding gain. i did it and used less compression and eq than i ever did with a kick and it sounded 10x better. i have no idea why it works differently. maybe its a summing issue, IDK. i put it out here to see if anyone else cared to experiment.
gain is, to be scientific, the co-efficient by which an un-amplified signal is multiplied by in order to give the amplified signal Seeing as we shoe-horn everything into decibel measurements, it's interchangeable with volume change The confusion arises when the high gain of one amplification stage causes the next stage to clip in some manner or other, such as in a guitar amp.
You are absolutely 100% out of your mind. 1 + 1 = 2 Always. There is no way of adding 1 + 1 and getting a "different" 2, or a 2 that looks kinda like an 8 from a side angle, or a 2 that behaves like a 3, or etc etc. putting the same signal on two tracks just makes it louder. It is not in any way different from doubling the volume/gain on a single track.
IIRC, 2 same signals played together should be 3dB louder. So yeah, if you claim there are absolutely no other factor in the process, all you are doing is making it louder and it has a placebo effect. If not, something is missing.
I'd buy that, I've been experimenting with a song, the wave forms are identical. and I've found recording to multiple tracks and duplicating 1 track to yield the same results. it makes the signal louder but to myself in a much more of a usable way. I still think there's something to be said about summing and how a DAW handles signals. if i just turn up the fader or use a plugin to add gain, i can't achieve the same results. so my computer can toggle 582 million transistors 3 billion times a second and never miss a digit? fuckin' sweet! EDIT: spell check
