The combination of the two polar patterns in phase-aligned microphones can produce a third polar pattern. This can be very handy as a mixing and postproduction technique as you can spend less time experimenting and trialling different set ups while the artist is waiting and more time tracking vocals or letting the magic unfold.
Using two switchable pattern microphones, like these AKG C414 microphones pictured, one of them can be set to cardioid and the other can be set to omnidirectional. This works well because while recording you can be monitoring and sending the cardioid microphone’s signal to the artist’s headphones, and mute the omni microphone until mixing, meaning that this setup is perfectly compatible with standard practices.
By adding the cardioid and the omni in different ways creates different polar patterns. Below are 5 common polar patterns. From left to right we have omnidirectional, subcardioid (or wide cardioid), cardioid, hypercardioid and figure-of-eight.
The following tables shows the mixing formula for creating these polar patterns.
The exact same process and results can be done with two cardioid microphones pointing in opposite directions. The table below shows the mixing values for combining two cardioid polar patterns to create other polar patterns.
So, why would you bother? The polar pattern is a very underrated aspect of a microphone’s capture. Here are some notes about each that might be interesting to think about.
An omnidirectional microphone will have the most reverberation of any polar pattern, so if you’re recording in a room with some ambience, an omni pattern will maximize this. The omni pattern is also immune to the proximity effect, therefore if you’re doing backing vocals at a distance, you might find the tone is a bit thin; an omni pattern will bring a bit of the bottom end back into the signal. The significant thing about this process is that you can change the polarity pattern after the recording has taken place, meaning you don’t have to spend as much time experimenting and you can spend more time tracking.
The figure-of-eight pattern is a highly underrated pattern in my opinion. Some notes about it that are worth knowing: the front portion of the figure-of-eight pattern is tighter and narrower than all of the other patterns. The figure-of-eight pattern exhibits the highest amount of proximity effect, so if you’re close to the sound source a figure-of-eight pattern will bring in more bottom end.
Flowing between different polar patterns will yield a wide range of sounds for the electric guitar, as the proximity effect creates a dramatic alteration to the guitar cabinet’s tone. Go towards the figure-of-eight polar pattern for a boomier sound and go towards the omnidirectional pattern for a thinner tone (this is assuming the microphones are positioned close to the speaker cabinet).
Much of what I’ve described is a manual way of achieving what microphones such as the Austrian Audio OC818 and the Lewitt LCT 640 TS. These microphones are essentially what I have described in this article, housed in a single unit. These microphones have two outputs giving you access to both polar patterns, which can then be blended to create any of the first order polar patterns described in this article.
So, there you are, an introduction to the concept of creating a virtual polar pattern by combining two phase-aligned microphone signals. The best thing about this is it can be done manually by just combining two different microphones! You don’t need to spend your left arm on one of the microphones listed above to get a taste of this technique.
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