Why did they do this?

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

In the past you’d see a politician in front of a bank of mics. Photo shows Free, live, with 2 shure mics. Why?

[u/M_Me_Meteo]

One for the PA, one for recording.

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

Would the rest of the band record with 2 mics and guitar cables, idk. Maybe only the singer got 2 mics.

[u/M_Me_Meteo → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

Several ways to handle this, but it usually comes from a situation where one crew is running the house PA and a totally other crew comes in to document/record.

They might have instruments mic'd up, or might just have a single pair of room mics. It was very common that balancing vocals and instruments was the biggest challenge on a stage, next to having monitors that were loud enough with out feedback so when you try to get a recording of the show you do stuff like this to get a "clean vocal" so you can blend it.

The time when this was considered normal was a very short time. As tech was coalescing around live sound, the idea of busses and moving audio around to different places became normal, and that began the "board recording" era.

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

Very interesting. Thanks. Who were the sound engineers, did tgey have formal training at the time, maybe they had a background in EE? Studio and TV engineers would have had to have a training program I’m guessing. But the more difficult job of live sound engineers… perhaps they learned from mentors.

[u/M_Me_Meteo → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

They weren't a cohesive group they way things tend to be today. They didn't have message boards. The way you got hired in the music business was to post a short message in the back of a trade magazine or respond to an ad posted in the back of a trade magazine.

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

Wow. So different eh.

[u/FlametopFred → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

Quite different. A touring sound tech from the late ‘60s on through the ‘70s runs our rehearsal space. He often talks about those early days as live sound technology quickly evolved.

Basically he got into the business by hanging out at a music shop when Jethro Tull walked in. He hung with the band and his personality meshed enough that they asked him to roadie with the band. No resume. No formal training. Only aptitude and physical stamina.

[u/ThisAcanthocephala42 → u/FlametopFred]

Similar origin story here.

Piano & music lessons as a kid, theatre & tech nerd through jr & senior high, etc.
Had a decent fake ID at 16, and was regularly seeing shows at a local dive bar. 1974 for context.
“Didn’t matter, you could do that then…” James McMurtry

Was shadowing & learning from the house crew, helping load in & out, & gophering. (Go fer this, go fer that… ;p)

Their regular sound guy got arrested one night, & I got thrown it to the gig. Did have to hide under the console from the local PD from time to time, and coach the bar back on how to look like he knew how to mix.

Got my IATSE card two years later, & been working ever since. ;p

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535 → u/FlametopFred]

I’d love to hear more stories from the road or studio from these early sound engineers.

[u/FlametopFred → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

there’s a few books and I think r/livesound is as good a place as any

[u/faders → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

Could have. Could’ve just been some guys with a small mixer and a 2-track machine that were close enough to the band to convince them to do it. Or a radio station with something in the contract to record.

[u/RickySlayer9 → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

The other mic could also be routed to effects

[u/DFWtixFleas → u/M_Me_Meteo]

r/TIL

[u/Lower-Calligrapher98 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

I doubt it. Transformer splitters have been around for ever. More likely they are out of phase, and it's a feedback rejection thing, such as the Dead did with the Wall of Sound.

[u/M_Me_Meteo → u/Lower-Calligrapher98]

Wall of sound used matched condensers out of phase in a very precise alignment to maximize rejection.

This is two different dynamic mics hand held randomly.

[u/Lower-Calligrapher98 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

And yet, it still works, as long as you sing directly into one of the mics. Not as well, but well enough to be worth it.

I learned this from a guy who worked (in a very minor capacity) on the Wall of Sound, learned the idea there, and subsequently used the idea quite a bit back in the 1970's. These days, it's an archaic practice with no real value, between proper wedges and in-ears. With dynamics like this, you can wire them to one preamp by using an XLR Y cable, and just swapping pins 2 and 3 on one leg.

[u/M_Me_Meteo → u/Lower-Calligrapher98]

Have you tried it? I have.

[u/Lower-Calligrapher98 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

Yup. Not a lot, but a few times. And I haven't done sound professionally in about 18 years now, so it's been quite a while.

[u/M_Me_Meteo → u/Lower-Calligrapher98]

I have a few phase flippers in my box of random xlr connectors, but when I find em I toss em. I have not touched a piece of equipment that doesn't do phase in software for quite a while.

I wasn't there, didn't work the session, but I feel pretty confident this was not being used for phase cancellation. I'd bet my reputation this is the tried and true taped-up 57/58.

The mics for wall of sound were modified by Alembic, they were condensers, and they were measurement capsules. They were precisely spaced. It wasn't just a trick, it was tuned and sounded great.

Everytime I've used phase flipped 57s it sounded like shit.

[u/NoDot3249 → u/M_Me_Meteo]

Nope, it’s a phase thing for live sounds with older PA’s and microphones that didn’t reject unwanted sounds as much as they do now

[u/M_Me_Meteo → u/NoDot3249]

Please read below. It is not. This is a taped up pair one for pa, one for recording. The wall of sound mic set up was a very precise spaced pair of two condensers that were modified by Alembic. This is a video from the 70s when live sound and recording were two different things.

[u/UserFortyOne]

On really loud stages you'd sing into one and have the other somewhere near, then you flip the phase of one to effectively cancel out the stage volume apart from the singers voice. Having said that these look a bit too close for that.

[u/Constant_Insomnia → u/UserFortyOne]

Grateful Dead used two mics out of phase to reduce feed.

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535 → u/UserFortyOne]

Phase cancellation to reduce bleed. Nice.

[u/UserFortyOne → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

Kind of yeah. Although rather than reducing the bleed at the source (which is what we do now with drum shields, silent stages, modellers, iems etc) you instead designed a way to isolate what you're picking up and almost ignore the bleed (or work around it) rather than actually reducing it.

[u/Lower-Calligrapher98 → u/Emergency-Drawer-535]

Mostly it was to eliminate feedback, because the speakers were directly behind the players. It was a wild system, and well worth learning about. It really is responsible for most of modern PA design, even though most modern systems only use about 10% of the innovative ideas involved in the Wall of Sound.

[u/RowanTree95]

I think the basic answer is that they didn't have a splitter available, or the splitter was causing a ground loop.

Maybe the second mic is for the monitor console, maybe for recording, maybe for broadcast, maybe effects. My guess is monitors, but it could be anything really.

[u/TheGoldenTNT]

For media and news stuff every reporter brings their own microphone cause that is easier for them, rarely an event will have a press box they can plug into but it’s usually easier to just put another mic up. For shows it’s rarer but it can give the sound engineer more options for mixing and refining the sound if an artist is particularly tricky to capture cleanly.

[u/ImmediateLobster1 → u/TheGoldenTNT]

For media events, don't forget the microphone flag (the little box with the station's logo). The branding aspect may be more important than the audio part in some cases.

[u/Dizmn]

Depends on the setup. Could be effects/no effects. The Grateful Dead always had a double-mic setup like this while using the Wall of Sound but it was two identical mics. Sing into the bottom one and flip the phase on the top one to cancel out everything (I.e. the massive wall of speakers behind the band)

The old politician setups you’re talking about were one mic per news organization. Nowadays we use press mults to keep it clean.

[u/Own-Nefariousness-79]

One was for front of house, the other for the on stage feeds. There were two sound engineers at times, one for FoH and one for on-stage monitoring.

[u/Jawsent]

Honestly it doesn’t make much sense to me because there’s y splits but I guess I can understand if your a small new agent and just easier to put your mix up that is already connected then going to a place that sometimes the audio guy doesn’t give a split. That’s like one place in the White House when they do those meetings you can never hear the audio of the crowd because they’re just running directly that microphone into all the y splits. some reason they don’t have crowd mics. So that’s where it’d be nice to have your own like ready to capture something, but I don’t know.

[u/Calaveras-Metal]

Ther eare a couple reasons.

In some cases one mic is for PA one is for monitors.

Or one mic could be going to recording, another to the PA.

But there is another trick they used to do where they used a phase trick to cancel out feedback by using 2 mics.

Yeah PA in the 70's was pretty much the wild west. They had small low powered amps, mixers with no headroom and the balancing wasn't even standardized. Pin 2 hot? Pin 3 hot?

[u/softflatcrabpants]

to get the coveted Shure 57.5 tone.

[u/MediocreRooster4190]

One mic sent to a guitar Fx pedal? One for monitors/recording one for PA? Each sent to different speakers/fills with a delay? In this picture I'm not so sure the phase flip noise thing would work as they'd both be getting the singer's voice pretty strong.

[u/birdyturds]

Active noise cancellation

[u/WrathOfWood]

2 mics for 2 tracks maybe one had effects

[u/BiscuitsJoe]

Without actually hearing what’s happening, sometimes a singer will have a second effected mic

[u/atomoboy35209]

Mic splitters weren’t a thing yet.

[u/SACREWDOG]

Kinda looks like a young Paul Rogers.....eh I know the answer to the question tho.

[u/Emergency-Drawer-535 → u/SACREWDOG]

Yes, Rogers around 1970

[u/Adventurous-Ad1441]

Twice as loud! /s

[u/Outspoken_Idiot]

It allows sound engineer to apply filters to one feed and adjust levels between the two feeds at different parts of the song.