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For the Berklee Intro to Music Production Class I'm currently taking online, I chose one of the topics that I've known about, but never proved it to myself - Comb Filtering due to reflective surfaces nearby monitors and microphones. (You are reading this on one of those reflective surfaces right now - don't record vocals while sitting in front of your computer screen!)

Here is the YouTube for it:
http://youtu.be/0IV7YAoIGAg

And I also exported the sound capture that I did while making the demonstration. It's at this soundcloud link: http://snd.sc/1d1zBKh

Yep, the physics do actually work! Whew!

-Scott

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Scott, thanx for sharing this as this is very important information for those of us with small home studios.


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Originally Posted By: MarioD
Scott, thanx for sharing this as this is very important information for those of us with small home studios.


Really important for folks that want to put monitor speakers up against walls to the side of the monitors.

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Thanks for that info Scott, the video didn't play for me, saying an error had occurred BUT your post got my brain into gear and I had a "duh" moment thanks to you smile which then explained, in technical terms, why I had to re-arrange my "studio" having got a large computer monitor.

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Most people run into this and don't really know what it is when they clone a track and nudge it a few milliseconds in an attempt to do doubling.

great post to get people thinking about this and to be aware of it is half the battle.


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Originally Posted By: rockstar_not
Originally Posted By: MarioD
Scott, thanx for sharing this as this is very important information for those of us with small home studios.


Really important for folks that want to put monitor speakers up against walls to the side of the monitors.


When I record vocals I turn off my monitors and use headphones. But I have a tendency to record in front of and facing my 23” monitor. I’m going to record myself both this way and off to the side, further away and not facing the monitor to see if there is a difference. Based on your experiment I’m sure there will be.


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Originally Posted By: MarioD
Scott, thanx for sharing this as this is very important information for those of us with small home studios.


Quote:
Really important for folks that want to put monitor speakers up against walls to the side of the monitors.


Scott,

To continue what we've discussed in PMs. I have my speakers about 18" behind my monitor and about 5' apart. As you know I was trying sitting in front of the monitor. I did not mention the the speakers are off during recording. Can I still get this effect from the mic alone?

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When I record anything with a mic, the mic is back from the monitor and I am facing away from the monitor..... the monitor is to my right side.

Comb filtering not only happens from the reflected surfaces..... and actually this is the less obvious form since the reflections are generally much much lower than the sound primary source.... depending greatly on the type of mic used and distance to the source and reflective surfaces.....

The more obvious comb filtering happens when tracks are cloned (exact copies) and recorded twice or more and layering is used. Many folks use the quick and dirty clone and nudge to try doubling. The danger here is that you have 2 or more very strong primary sources mixed together and the comb filter can be very obvious in this situation as the tracks and their material and frequencies interact with each other. You hear it when people do vocal doubling the wrong way.

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 08/21/13 08:02 AM.

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Audio Monitors should always be off when you record. Always. Putting your mic in front of the computer monitor is a bad idea because sound will reflect off the monitor and show up at the mic just ever so slightly after the direct signal. Depending on the specific frequency dependent sensitivity of the mic, comb filtering is highly likely to occur.

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One other thing that has just dawned on me - the video capture I did is actually reversed. When you see the comb filter notches moving, they are moving in the opposite direction than what you might expect. I am very new at doing videos (using Windows Live Movie Maker and a web cam) and I'll have to see if somehow I clicked on something that made the web cam reverse image the video. If it's not easy to fix, I'm not fixing it!

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I went back to the screen capture program I used to grab the video and sure enough, there was a tick box 'flip horizontally' that was ticked when I fired up the software. Oops!

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