The Mid/Side Technique: Episode 14 of Creative Recording with Tape Op

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:15][music] >> Let's talk about mid-side technique.

[00:00:30]First of all, what is it? And secondarily, when should you use it?

[00:00:37]>> Well, secondarily, if you don't understand it, never is when you should use it.

[00:00:43]>> [laughter] >> Because I've suffered through mixes where people did it wrong. But, yes, mid-side technique is using a figure-of-eight microphone and a uh cardioid microphone together at the same as close to the same places you can get. The figure-of-eight microphone is set up to pick up sound on the two sides. The center mic is pointing like towards the source, more or less. And the thing is, you take those two signals from the two mics, you bring it basically to like a mixer or into a plug-in or on a uh whatever you want to do. You You make two instances. You mult the figure-eight mic on the two channels, pan them left and right, and flip the polarity on one of those channels. Now, what this does is, crazy enough, gives you kind of like the each side of the mic, now that you flip them out of phase against each other, you you you killed the center stuff. So, now you have this sort of stereo from mono, which is improbable.

[00:01:47]The only problem with this wonderful magic trick is that what happens when you put that mix in mono?

[00:01:55]Everything disappears. So, that's why you have the center mic.

[00:01:59]Now, the center mic is there to use in a ratio with these side mics, right? The your figure eight. So, you got these center the center image and then you're blending in how much stereo we're bringing into that. Now, we Now, when we go to mono, we hear only the center mic, but we still have total phase coherency.

[00:02:19]It's perfect.

[00:02:22]Jeff, when have you used this technique and it's not worked?

[00:02:26]>> Uh to be honest with you, I do not use it.

[00:02:29]>> Yeah.

[00:02:30]>> Um and the reason I don't use it is because um I felt I I should say I've only recently started to use it. Um mainly because I just didn't fully grasp or feel like I had the ability to sort of get it right.

[00:02:48]>> Yeah.

[00:02:48]>> Um I've definitely been on sessions where we've recorded it that way with somebody that knew what the hell they were doing. And then I've ended up using mixing um and both using the technique that you mentioned with mult the mult, etc. Or using uh plug-in.

[00:03:08]And there are some great ones out there that can really Yeah, and then and then it has like these interesting >> And there's hardware, too. There's hardware that'll do the decoding for you as well.

[00:03:16]>> Right. And the [snorts] benefits of it are that you do get some pretty you can get some pretty wild imaging. And you can get super wide.

[00:03:24]>> Yeah.

[00:03:24]>> You can you can you can really play with that stereo stereo width and it that can be really interesting and sonically you know, it's another tool at your disposal to use. Um I you know, >> But I think it's a dangerous tool.

[00:03:38]>> Yeah.

[00:03:39]>> So, one of the experiences I had was on a very prominent indie rock person's solo album.

[00:03:48]And they had generally record themselves all the time and they had had someone track drums for some of their their stuff. And we were trying to mix it and the drums had been tracked with a mid-side mic array as a overhead on the drums.

[00:04:03]And it was so it was too close to the kit. And this is the one thing I'll point out about mid-side all the time.

[00:04:11]It's the closer you get the worse things are.

[00:04:14]Mid-side will work, in my opinion, much better like across the room or nearby with a sound and give you a nice width and stuff. The closer you get the more you're getting like a more um more of a spread of what you're picking up because you're closer on the left and the right and you're losing more information when you go to mono. When you go back a little bit you can get a wonderful like ambience or sort of a picture say like in front of a drum kit, you know, or acoustic guitar or something. You come right up on the guitar you're just going to have so much is going to change when it goes to mono.

[00:04:49]And also that left and right that you've created, all of that is always going to be out of phase with some other mic if there's multiple mics involved. So on a drum set you've got a kick and a snare mic and then you've got this up thing up here which always has one lobe, one side, out of phase with the other stuff.

[00:05:12]>> Right.

[00:05:12]>> So you're in this impossible situation.

[00:05:16]Whenever I've been sent stuff now and they say I recorded it mid-side I just go through and if they split it into three channels by that point maybe in the digital realm you might just do that instead of analog tape you would try to conserve the two just two tracks, split it later.

[00:05:31]So they'd give you three tracks, I would just go through and figure out which one to just throw away and usually just use like sometimes even use one side of the mid-side and the center mic as left and right >> Mhm.

[00:05:43]>> overheads and just get rid of that. So I've had horrible experiences with it, but >> [laughter] >> I also own a mic called by Shure called the VP88.

[00:05:58]Video production is what it stands for.

[00:06:00]It's a mic with built-in mid-side encoding. Like so, basically, it will send to you a stereo signal out that's already mid-sided.

[00:06:11]>> Mhm.

[00:06:12]>> And that mic, I mean, probably because the capsules are lined up so perfect and they've got their own circuitry inside and everything, can present like a wonderful like single like a two-channel stereo drum recording like no other mics.

[00:06:27]I've recorded drums like that on records where we had to save save tracks. It sounded amazing.

[00:06:31]>> Already encoded.

[00:06:32]>> It's already encoded. You So, you just you you go high, medium, or low width.

[00:06:36]You have a switch.

[00:06:38]>> Interesting.

[00:06:39]>> Or you can you can run it un-decoded.

[00:06:41]And you can run it out as the two separate mics. Like one's going to be So, you have a little Y cable coming out of the mic. But that mic is magic. And on certain sources and things like say maybe like a Hammond organ on the Leslie, you know, you find the right spot, which would just be all you need.

[00:06:58]It sounds amazing. So, there are cases where something like that is just so perfectly somehow integrated with itself, too.

[00:07:07]Works great.

[00:07:08]>> Cool. I got to get one of those.

[00:07:09]>> Yeah. Oh, they're fun.

[00:07:11]And they're Bob one of Bob Weston's favorite mics, too.

[00:07:14]Strangely enough.

[00:07:40]>> Ooh.

[00:07:41]>> [music]