Naturally we get lots of questions about how to mic different instruments for recording. Many of them have a common thread of frustration and inconsistent results: “The instrument sounds so different over the studio monitors in the control room compared to what it sounds like in person,” is a common comment.
Obviously there are many specific ways things can sound different, and many different things that happen between the instrument and its reproduction through your studio monitors so there is never going to be one (or even 21) easy answers for this. You can see from reading our inSync Summits on line that there are many different miking techniques available for just one instrument.
But there is one simple tip that can help everyone. Put your finger or a very well made earplug in one ear as you listen to the instrument. Your natural stereo hearing causes you to perceive the complex and subtle array of direct and reflected sounds in a fundamentally different way from any single microphone. By only listening through one of your ears you can move around the source and hear it much more closely to the way a microphone is likely to pick it up. This is an excellent way to get the microphone in that special “sweet spot.” Be careful around loud instruments. I wouldn’t go sticking my head in a bass drum, for example. Historically engineers have used a second engineer (or other studio shreve) to move microphones around while they monitor from the control room. This is a workable and sometimes necessary technique, but often is more haphazard than putting your own well trained ear on the subject first. You can still use the second for minor tweaks later.