Plug-in suggestions for 1 overhead Mic....

[jono not bono]

Yo ho ho,

Ok, so I've recorded many a drum kit and sometimes, depending on what I feel like ,and what kinda music it is, I like to use 1 Mic for overheads on a drum kit, obviously I like using 2 Mics to give a an even stereo image of the drum kit but do also like to involve room Mics for ambience and well, I could go on as most of you guys/girls can do ...

Heres my question,

When only using one Condenser positioned in front of the kit, above the kit, slightly angled down, but (and is very important to note here), dead centre of the drum kit, are there any clever plugins that allow you to 'almost' spread the 1 mono overhead file across the speakers whilst mixing etc.

I'm just curious to know of any magical plugins that I don't know about haha, and yeah any help would be great

Thanks for your time

Jono_not_Bono
x

Ps, The easy answer is use a matching pair of overheads but lets not be silly

[Tony Ramone]

Isn't there some sort of stereo widener plug-in?
The guys that write soundonsound use it a lot on their mix rescues.
I think it might be made by Waves, but I'm not sure.
If I can find one of my magazines I'll let you know

[brandondrury]

With a mono source, I'm not aware of any stereo wideners. Most of those use phasing tricks to cancel the center out.

The one thing you can do is experiment with short, panned delays. By panning 5-10ms to the left and 10-15ms to the right you can give the illusion of a "non center" overhead. Of course, this is definitely not stereo.

Good luck.

Just keep in mind that there is no magic cure for this. You won't ever get a real stereo overhead out of a single mic, but you can certainly do some creative things.

Brandon

[String7th]

Here's a couple options
Stereo emulator
Stereo Phase control

But if you can't afford these, you can emulate stereo by using heavy reverb to bury the mono sound and spread accross a stereo image.

[tatteredstudios]

waves has one called S1.....works really well, but as all waves plugins, it's expensive

[brandondrury]

waves has one called S1

Does the S1 work with mono signals? Just curious.

Brandon

[String7th]

Brandon, it doesn;t work on mono sources.
It actually says that in the description. It's intended on balancing stereo signals without having export to 2 mono tracks. It really does wonders to 2 overhead mics that were placed too far. It brings them closer without ruining phase.

[jono not bono]

Originally Posted by Tony Ramone

Isn't there some sort of stereo widener plug-in?
The guys that write soundonsound use it a lot on their mix rescues.
I think it might be made by Waves, but I'm not sure.
If I can find one of my magazines I'll let you know

Thank you very much my friend

[jagcmos]

Make a copy of the mono track and use a combination of delay and eq.
Might work...

[jono not bono]

Originally Posted by jagcmos

Make a copy of the mono track and use a combination of delay and eq.
Might work...

Yeah the thing is, is that I do use stemming and other techniques but using delay is the only thing I've found to create a passable sonic illusion.

The should bring out a plugin called scapel, and this will literally allow you to surgically slice through the centre of a mono track and allow you to pva glue the 2 little slags across the stereo field ..(I'm still working on the PVA technology but I hear PVA glue is quite odourless, basically colourless, whilst being very transparent (all of which are essential with 4th party plugins) which won't ruin the overall effect say that of solvent based superglue hahaha

Im just curious as to what other people would do in this little experiment of 1 mic overhead recording...

Jono_not_Bono