Joe's Bar

[mikej]

Yeah.  Basically that. 

"I make sure the initial transient is positive."

* I kinda vaguely understand and would appreciate if you explain more. 

In simple terms - when you zoom in on the waveform in the DAW - the start of the waveform is moving upwards.

"I don't usually tend to align the transients of the OHs with the direct mics, unless it sounds a bit off for...OH mics as they are further away..."

*Good point. Is it bc if the transients are lined up, the OH wouldn't be an OH anymore?

This is actually quite a deep technical and philosophical question.  This might confuse things further, but...

Yes - sort of.  For me it's more down to thinking about how all the waves from all the different mics combine to give the illusion of instruments in a space.

I tend to think of it like this: 

We could record a live performance of musicians in room with just a stereo pair of mics.  Do no further processing and release the recording as is.  You can find recordings made exactly like this.  The recordings really do recreate a sense of depth and space, which is down to how the waveforms of all the musicians are combined and captured by the two microphones when played back on our speakers. 

We might think about the final result in terms of how the musicians are arranged in the room, and where the microphone pair is  placed.

In effect, what we are doing with mixing our multi-mic'd studio sessions is recreating the illusion of a session recorded with just a stereo pair of mics. The multi-mic'd session gives us the ability to manipulate and fine tune more aspects of the recording and gives us greater control over how all the individual sounds are combined.

I tend to think in terms of how the sound waves are hitting the microphones, how we are combining all of them and how this translates to a sense of space and depth.       

Cheers!