Contact Mic, Ex. C, Three Violinists

TOR / ODESSA Montreal / Subject 1 / Anatomy of a Mix / Contact Mic / Example C

This iteration presents a rough balance of three violinists or one and a half stands of the first violin section. Because these contact microphone signals were summed in post-production, the sounds from the individual violins do not interact with each other or the room. Despite this, as the contact microphone signals accumulate they seem to take on an increasingly acoustic quality, as if there is now a small amount of space in which the signal is now reverberating. Perhaps this is a natural result of increasing amounts of varied instrumental resonance from the bodies of the violins themselves.

This excerpt is the same as the one above, except that the contact microphones have been separated out using stereo source panning in post-production. The concertmaster is centered while the second and third chairs are hard left and right respectively. This perspective is not one that exists in the concert hall, though panning in this instance is not an aesthetic choice but a perceptual one: when the signals are summed, auditory masking effects how much of each contact microphone can be heard. By separating out our sources, more details about each violinist are exposed. While the first and second chair violinists are consistently coherent in terms of phrasing, this version shows how the third violinist sometimes differs in terms of bow changes and other performance-related decisions. This submix completely disregards physical spacing between players or timing differences, so it is interesting to note that this player is sitting behind the first stand and listening forward.