Recording Music on Location, 2nd Edition

9Overview of Stereo Microphone Techniques

Stereo miking is the preferred way to record classical music ensembles and soloists, such as a symphony performed in a concert hall or a string quartet piece played in a recital hall.

Stereo mic techniques capture the sound of a musical group as a whole, using only two or three microphones. When you play back a stereo recording, you hear phantom images of the instruments in various spots between the speakers. These image locations—left to right, front to back—correspond to the instrument locations during the recording session.

In this chapter we look at several techniques for recording in stereo.

Advantages of Stereo Miking

When recording popular music, we put a mic near each instrument, record it, and ...