You put one microphone
on top of the snare
for the crack.
And one underneath
for the rattle of the wires.
Each one sounds great
on its own.
Push them up together
and the drum gets smaller.
Thinner.
The body gone.
As if somebody
stepped on a blanket
over it.
Nothing is wrong with the microphones.
They are fighting.
When the stick hits the top head,
the head moves down.
The microphone above it
sees the air pressure fall.
The one below
sees it rise.
The same hit
arrives as two signals
that move in opposite directions.
Add them together
and they partly cancel,
and what cancels most
is the low, round part
you wanted.
The fix is one button.
On the bottom channel,
flip the polarity.
On most desks and plugins
it looks like a circle
with a line through it.
People call it the phase button.
It is really polarity.
It turns the signal upside down,
so the two microphones
push the same way again.
Press it,
listen,
and the drum comes back.
The same thing hides
in other places.
A microphone close to a guitar amp
and another a step away.
A kick drum
with one microphone inside
and one outside.
There the problem is not opposite directions.
It is distance.
Sound takes time to travel,
so the far microphone
hears every note a little late,
and some frequencies
cancel while others add.
Flipping polarity
will not fix that.
Moving the microphone will.
Or nudging the late track
earlier
until they line up.
A few milliseconds
is enough to matter.
At that distance
you cannot hear it as an echo.
You only hear
that the guitar went hollow
and you cannot say why.
So check the mix in mono
before you trust anything.
Problems like this
hide in stereo.
Mono makes them obvious.
Two good parts
do not always add up
to one better sound.
Sometimes they need
to agree on direction
before they help each other.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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