Mid Side

Here's a picture from my recording session today of a Mid-Side microphone setup. This is the first time I've personally experimented with MS miking and it turned out really nice. We were recording acoustic guitar and it's really nice being able to control the center and the sides separately giving you total control on width and focus of the sound source. It's nice compared to recording in XY or spaced pairs where it's total stereo, in MS you can get a pretty focused mono sound (which I usually prefer in acoustic guitar tracks) and give it a little bit of width, dimension and space.

MS miking is pretty simple. You'll need 2 microphones, one in cardioid and one in bi-directional/figure-8, in my picture below the Violet Amethyst (pictured on top) is the cardioid condenser microphone acting as the center or "mid", which will face directly at the sound source, and the Cascade Fathead (pictured on the bottom) is a bi-directional ribbon microphone acting as the "side", which will face perpendicular to the sound source. Once you have them recorded on two separate tracks, run them through a MS matrix/encoder and you're done. Now you can adjust your stereo balance by changing the levels of each track.