OneMic Series - San Geronimo - Pay Day

OneMic - the minimalist recording series by John Cuniberti demonstrates that an entire band can be recorded with only one stereo microphone in one take. Each recording session is shot in 4k video on a Sony a7RII by filmmaker Nathaniel Kohfield. What makes this series so different from other live performance videos is that the artist is in complete control of his/her presentation. This means that the sound, balance, dynamics and stereo image is decided upon at the moment of creation, not in post production. The artist (band) is responsible for the final product. There is no editing of the audio or video. It’s as honest as it can be including imperfections. This organic presentation isn’t limited to “acoustic” music as seen with live classical and folk music. In this series veteran recording engineer John Cuniberti records bands with electric guitars and drums that would normally require a multi-mic, multi-track approach. This is not the first time this has been done but this technique was quickly forsaken soon after the multi-track tape recorder was invented and with it a loss of a level of musical intimacy. The OneMic series demonstrates the positive aspects of the minimalistic recording process of the 1930s but will be captured on modern stereo recording equipment.

[creativesoundlab]

It sounds so good! One of my favorite video series!

[instantkarma]

Actually it's two 8-pattern mikes in Blumlein config, but nevertheless brilliant and still the simplest and best way of capturing sound.

[chuckdembecki]

One of the best recordings/performances I’ve ever heard. Keep it up San Geronimo /John 😊

[MilanCekic]

I'm in love with this recording and miking approach.... btw, the song is great!

[walthaus]

Regarding the vocal verb, guitar dry question below:
The engineer mentions "light" mastering in his description. What he does ( IMHO) is decoding/ splitting the left/right stereo track into MS (mid/side) stereo. The way it separates the audio is basically like this: Everything fully correlated (left channel being identical to the right channel) becomes the M-signal and everything less correlated (left channel different than the right channel) becomes the S-signal. Now consider that the vocal is situated dead center while the guitar (due to it's size) is spread wider (meaning that it is less identical left vs right) so that makes the vocal being relatively isolated on the M-channel during the open and even later, when it is the dominant sound regarding mid and high frequency information. Highpass the M-signal to eliminate Bass and kick drum and send the resulting isolated vocal to the reverb and add reverb output back to the regular Left/Right stereo, voila. We never hear the M-channel, we only hear its reverb return added to the original XY stereo track. Listening to the track 's S-signal (via an MS hardware decoder ) confirms my suspicion, you hear mostly dry guitars, etc, but only reverbreturn vocals, but I could be wrong of course..
Mastering uses MS decoding all the time to treat mid sources separate from side sources, etc.
And I agree, this is such an awesome series/ project. Really inspiring, the way music is supposed to be performed and recorded, Great stuff.

[Miesn]

Epic! But at the beginning of the song when he sings there is a reverb on the vocals but not on the guitar. How is this possible? Great video series!!!