Dealing With Alignment & Phase

 When it comes to using more than one mic on any instrument you will immediately run into phase and alignment issues with your mix when tracking. This will result in flaming (slight delayed echo sound) and thin sounding drums as two mic's out of phase will almost cancel one another out. Even Mic's themselves respond to sound in different ways from type used (Ribbon, Dynamic, Condenser etc) and all these factors have to be addressed before any real recording is done.

Dealing With Phase

  Now most of these issues can be somewhat eradicated by setting up the mic's properly, by that I mean, having them both equidistant from the source they're going to pick up. A good engineer will spend sometime making sure mic's are in the right place for best tonal quality as well as the exact distance from the sound source (a snare drum for example) to avoid phase issues. It's also important in the case of 2x Drum Overhead mic's also being a matched pair, as even different mic's will pick up sounds differently.

Dealing With Alignment

 Alignment is something similar as phase and can be caused by some of the same issues, but as can be seen in the example below, the alignment of the close mic and far mic (set further back from source), has been caused by the sound being picked up on the one mic first and then the delay in the time it takes for the same sound to be picked up on the other mic placed. This delay between mic's picking up the same sound at different times causes alignment to be off. See in the pic below, from a Pro Tools Session, how the Kick (close mic) and Kick (far mic) are both out of phase with one another, one wave file is going up whilst the others wave file is going down. They should both be the same. 

 You can also see their alignment is off. The sound is hitting the Kick (far mic) first and then a delay in the mix before we see the same Kick sound on the (close mic). They should be perfectly aligned in the mix window. 

 I must admit I believe someone has labelled the session file the wrong way round as the sound clearly would hit the close mic first and then the mic placed further away from the Kick drum second lol. Mistakes are easily made, long hours and short sleeps will do that to a person.

How to Fix in the Mix.

 Now if the tracking stage is well and truly over and re-doing the recording is impossible your only choice is to fix it in the mix. This was easily done in Pro Tools using a bit of the zoom tool and a wonderful freely included plugin utility called (Time Adjuster).

 As you can see in the example above we firstly set our time grid to 'Samples' and then we, by eye only, highlight the distance between the start of the kick hit on one track with the start of the hit of the Kick on the other. In the transport view you can see it's reading 76 samples. So we simply type that into 'Time Adjuster' that fixes the alignment. Secondly we click the phase flip switch, that little orange button just to the right of where we type in the samples, and that flips the phase meaning when one track wave file is going up the other one is now doing the same. Viola all done both Kick mic's now aligned and in phase with one another creating a tight loud pleasant thump giving us the sound as it should be heard.

So What Is The Problem?

Well in Studio One 3 we don't have an included plugin utility that does the same thing as 'Time Adjuster' does in Pro Tools, so how can we achieve the same fixes without extra costs on shelving out for something like SoundRadix Auto Align ,which is far more advanced, but automates the whole entire process. Well watch the video below and all will be revealed.