What if you could set-up the microphones, record your classical guitar and configure the best polar pattern your room after the recording is finished?

Polar pattern selection on large-diaphragm condensers is not a new thing, a few microphones intergrade continuously variable selectors that allow in-between pattern selection, or allow the two capsules to be recorded in separate tracks. Austrian Audio expands the possibilities with the PolarDesigner plugin.

The most important feature of the plugin is that it enables us to craft the perfect polar pattern responses across up to five crossover bands, at any time after the recording is finished. To make the plugin even more useful, Austrian Audio has packed a lot more into the PolarDesigner to perfectly fine-tune your sound.

Usual suspects

I decided to try it first on an M/S setup, I used the two output method only on the Mid microphone, I positioned it at 96cm high and around 60cm from the top of my classical guitar with a slight downward angle so that it is on-axis with the spruce top. I placed the second OC818 on top of the first in Figure-8 pattern.

Basic sounds

With the Side mic muted, I concentrated on the Mid mic for a while.

The unprocessed track, with each capsule recorded at a different track, is unusable without the PolarDesigner plugin, but that was expected.

First, I wanted to see how the basic patterns would behave. So, I enable the plugin, as well as some lean low-cut and high-cut filters.

Tweaking the patterns

After playing around with the controls for some time, I found that the Omni pattern assigned to the lower frequencies gives a beautiful body sound to my guitar. Cardioid and Wide-Cardioid patterns were chosen for the mids, to bring tones of the guitar in focus. And for the highs, I used more of a Wide-Cardioid pattern to add some room ambience.

I also used the free-field equalization preset, which I'm not exactly sure what the underneath processing is, but gave more depth and definition to the overall sound. I boosted the lows a little with the proximity control bar.

And finally, I added the Mid channels to the mix and balanced all three to get a natural room sound.

Conclusions

As you can see, the possibilities are endless, and you only have to position the microphones once, record a couple of takes and then figure out the perfect polar response during mixing.

Additionally, on remote location recording, lugging up monitors to accurately check that the microphones are placed in the most desirable position can be quite unattractive. Headphones, on the other hand, are never the best option to judge stereo spread and overall tonal balance. The PolarDesigner plugin allows for fine-tuning to take place with the speakers and room you know and trust at your mixing room.

Click here for the full review of both the Austrian Audio OC818.

PolarPilot App

Austrian Audio designed an App that allows for real-time wireless control over the analogue bias voltages of the OC818, allocating 255 discrete polar patterns for us to choose. Plus access to high-pass, and pad in realtime via Bluetooth. Unfortunately, they didn't send me the OCR8 Bluetooth dongle that is required for this to work, so I couldn't test it out.

The judgement day

The plugin allows uses some sort of AI that determines what is important and not and provides a spill terminator or maximize target algorithm which should in principle reduce unwanted spill from other instruments But, I didn't get to use.

Austrian Audio