It’s easier to think of if you imagine a sountrack session. They have LOTS of mics within relative proximity to one another, yet there isn’t a significant amount of phase cancellation when they’re summed. How is that possible? Wouldn’t you have even more bleed than a drum kit?

With no forethought.. Yes. Plenty more. However, it’s a combination of techniques that provide the solution.

The first is baffling. The brass and percussion are first to be separated because of their relative volume (loud!) and there may be some other barriers between other sections. This can be overdone because although the idea is limited separation, it’s not sterility.

The second is miking. Most of these sessions start with the distant mics as the foundation and fill in spots with other mics placed on specific sections. Decca Tree (equilateral triangle of mics used to capture the performers as a whole) provides the basis of what we hear, but that can become a little far away-sounding, so the recordist mics sections. If you had all section mics at equal volume plus the Decca, things would get somewhat phasey… But through careful blending of volume and tone, that’s not the case.

Going even further, the Decca mics aren’t recording the sources exactly the same as the close mics. They’re recording more reflections, more of the room. So.. If you have a recording of an instrument’s interaction with the space and another of the instrument rather close up (say 3-4 feet or less), they’re not going to cancel as much because the waveforms won’t be exactly the same. Ever notice this with room mics on the drums? They usually don’t cancel all that much…

The lean will still be there no matter if you nudge an OH left or right to be sample-accurate in terms of phase. Why? Because although the signal directly emanating from the source (snare’s a good test) will be in phase, the reflections from other parts of the kit and especially the room will never be in phase – you just moved them out of phase, in fact. If you had a perfectly symmetrical room, kit, player (!), etc. then perhaps this technique would work. However, any difference between the entirety of what two different mics pick up will result in some degree of phase cancellation that cannot be fixed after the fact.

PhaseTone is a great free plugin to help with phase correction and manipulation.

Hey Joe, do you know if the Digi 003 or PT has a mono button feature, so you can listen to the sound in mono? Or should I just leave it panned up the middle?