• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

WikiAudio

Best Audio Recording Gear, Musical Instruments, & Home Studio Guides

  • Audio Interfaces
  • Studio Headphones
  • Studio Monitors

MS (Mid-Side) Microphone Technique

2018-04-10 By WikiAdmin Leave a Comment

M/S stereo is short for Mid-side stereo. MS stereo microphones exist but you can also create the effect with a good quality cardioid mic and condenser with a figure 8 polar pattern.

400px-MSDiagram

Setup

  • Place the cardioid mic where you would normally position it to capture direct sound from the source and place the figure-8 mic with its diaphragm at a 90-degree angle to the diaphragm of the Cardioid mic. The Cardiod microphone is called the mid mic and the fig 8 is called the side mic.

Analog recording

  1. Bring the Figure 8 mix up into a console and then take a feed from the direct out of that channel and bring it back in via a line input on another channel
  2. Bring up the cardioid mic and center pan it.
  3. Take the two channels of the figure 8 microphone and pan one left and one right. Now reverse the phase of one of the splits.Listen to the cardioid signal and bring up the signal from the condenser mic and you will hear the sound change from mono to a wide stereo signal.

When you mono the figure 8 signal, the left and right signal should cancel each other out and leave the cardioid mono signal.

Digital recording

For digital recording you can either follow the directions above (they will work perfectly fine) or instead of splitting the signal of the figure 8 mic as posted in step #1 above, you can simply record both mics on their own respective tracks and then take the figure 8 mic track and copy it to another track after recording. You should then have 2 figure 8 tracks. Now simply phase reverse one of them using a phase reverse feature of your DAW.

Filed Under: Info Article

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • What is the Haas Effect?
  • Oscillator Sync
  • Wave Field Synthesis
  • ADAT Lightpipe
  • Equal Loudness Contour

Copyright© 2023 ยท Wikiaudio.org

  • Affiliate Disclosure
  • Contact Us