Quote:
Originally Posted by
andonwego
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I'm sure there's got to be some kind of elite consensus on this...
but I'm curious if other recordists share this 'extremist' opinion. Or is it not extremist at all?
This has been my basic premise in designing my rig. I currently plug a True Precision 8 (incredibly clean, modern, 8ch preamp) into a Yamaha i88x (two chanels of '90s clean preamp (usually bypassed, but available as an almost charactered alternative) and eight channels of uncolored ADC). My go to mics are a pair of Earthworks QTC40s for just about everything, followed by a Neumann BCM104, followed by two Blue Mice, and then a couple dynamics and a handful of character mics for different types of distortion and flavor when necessary to improve a project.
A ribbon track or a tube track can really shine in the right mix, but that coloration doesn't stand out right if you just use it on everything.
In the location recording forum, the mod talks about how he recorded Another Kind of Blue, and it became clear to me that he is even more strongly dedicated to this proposal than I am.
His rig for that show consisted of three 8 channel splitters, three Precision 8s and a hard drive recorder. For mics, he basically blanketed the stage with TLM103s. I had never even conceptualized so many TLM103s in one room before. Now, that's not a completely colorless beast, in the way that a QTC40 is colorless but it's pretty goshdarn close, and with that many mics on a tiny stage, I think pickup pattern starts to become a deciding factor.
Hopefully you will find this thread as redemptive and encouraging as I do:
https://gearspace.com/board/remote-p...rs-thread.html
But I've also read that plenty of great radio vocals are tracked through 1073s and clones thereof. I don't think they're smeared at all. I'd say when you get it right with those tools, they results are shiny, like the sun's hitting the voice. It's just that, as with the summer sun shining off a swimming pool, sometimes you can't see the whole image behind all the brightness. But that doesn't mean you don't like what you're seeing. It's actually all more beautiful than anything in the world, until the migraine sets in.
So, yeah, it's all a matter of taste, and tastes vary. If someone only wants to sing through a tube mic, then I'm happy I have my R0DE NTK. If I can put up a couple others behind it and just let them A/B the results after their soundcheck, well, we usually end up making a cleaner record. If I had a Neve channel lying around, it might be a similar draw, and once I learned how to use it, it would become part of my arsenal, just like any tool.