Chapter 12 Exercises — Recording Instruments

These exercises have two jobs. The first is to put your hands on every placement map in the chapter — the speaker cone, the twelfth fret, the banjo head you haven't met yet — because maps you've walked are the only maps you remember. The second is to run the flip test so many times that it stops being a procedure and becomes a twitch. By the end of Part C, "mono, flip, listen low, keep fuller" should take you less time than reading this sentence. That's not a stretch goal. That's the floor.

Legend and ground rules:

• ★ marks exercises with a worked answer in the appendix "Answers to Selected Exercises." Wrestle first, peek second.
• Times are honest averages for focused work. Rushing the Listening Lab defeats its purpose — the deliverable there isn't an answer, it's a calibrated you.
• Gear: any microphone counts — USB, interface mic, the phone in your pocket. Several drills are designed around the phone. No exercise in this set requires a second "real" microphone, an amp, or a drum kit, though every one of them gets richer if you have access.
• Level-match before every comparison. The louder take wins by default, and your education does not exempt you (Chapter 4).

Part A: Conceptual Understanding

A1. The speaker atlas, from memory. ★ (10 min) Without looking back at the diagram, sketch or describe the face of a guitar-amp speaker and label the four tonal zones — dust-cap center, cap-edge seam, mid-cone, cone edge — with one tonal adjective each. Then name the three dials of amp micing (position across the face, distance, axis) and, for each, what it buys and what it bills. Finish with one sentence on why Theo's one-inch move changed more than three years of EQ did.

A2. The soundhole indictment. (10 min) A friend mics their acoustic at the soundhole from eight inches "because that's where the sound comes out" and complains about boom. Write the verdict: what the soundhole actually is, mechanically; why pointing a cardioid at it stacks two bass problems on top of each other; where to aim instead and at what distance; and why this is a placement verdict, not a mic verdict or a guitar verdict. Close by naming the electric-guitar version of the same mistake — the spot that looks like the obvious target and is actually an extreme.

A3. The doctrine ledger. (10 min) State the DI safety doctrine in one sentence. Then build its ledger: the complete cost (be honest — it's short) and the three payoffs, each with one sentence of mechanism. Finish with this: re-amping separates two decisions that are usually welded together at the moment of capture. Name the two decisions, and explain why pulling them apart matters more to a bedroom producer than to a commercial studio with five amps in a closet.

A4. Phase versus polarity, on paper. ★ (15 min) Define polarity and phase so a smart friend could tell them apart — your definition of phase must explain why a single 1 ms time offset puts different frequencies in different relationships. Then make the chapter's argument for why the ∅ button cannot repair a time offset (the comb-exchange argument), give one scenario where the flip is the complete fix and one where only a nudge will do, and end with the two-phrase vocabulary discipline that signals you know the difference.

A5. The 3:1 autopsy. (10 min) The 3:1 guideline gets misquoted constantly, so pin it down: which multi-mic situation is it actually for (and which situation from this chapter is it not for)? What does it accomplish mechanically — and what does it not accomplish? Where does the roughly-10 dB figure come from, and why does the chapter hedge it? Apply it in one sentence: vocal mic six inches from a singer, guitarist playing in the same room — where does the guitar mic's minimum distance to the singer land?

A6. Stereo geometry triage. (10 min) From memory, rebuild the three-row stereo table: XY, ORTF, spaced pair — geometry, what the stereo image is built from (level, time, or both), relative width, mono fold-down behavior, and the reach-for-it-when. Then answer the question the table exists to serve: why does the chapter tell most readers to double-track for width before graduating to a stereo pair, and what does recorded width give you that built width never will — at what cost?

A7. The string law. (5 min) State the one geometric law of the Glyn Johns method and the cheap tool that enforces it. Then the physics: why does equal distance to the snare's center keep the backbeat solid when the two mics are panned apart — and what, specifically, does the snare sound like when the law is broken by eight inches?

A8. Bleed, both faces. (10 min) Give two concrete ways bleed handcuffs you at mix time (name the processing moves that go wrong). Then give two production situations where bleed is the right choice and say what it buys in each. Finish with the bedroom superpower: explain "overdubbing is perfect isolation by scheduling" — and name the one thing overdubbing costs that a live ensemble take keeps.

Part B: 🎧 Listening Lab

Listen on the best playback you own, then re-check one drill on earbuds. Keep the Chapter 4 journal going, in band vocabulary (sub / lows / low-mids / mids / high-mids / air). Streaming versions are fine throughout. The standing disclaimer applies to every drill here: production, performance, era, and processing differ wildly between records — you're training trait recognition, not running session archaeology. Write what you hear, not what the lore says you should hear.

B1. DI versus amp'd bass, on records you can name. (20 min) The chapter promised you'd learn to hear this. Three specimens:

• Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On." James Jamerson's bass lines at Motown went into the console direct — cutting bass DI was the studio's documented working method, and Chapter 5 already took you inside the Snake Pit. Listen to the bass alone for a full verse: the evenness of the low end note to note, the intimate fingertip detail on the attacks, and — the giveaway — the absence of air around the notes. No speaker, no room, no grit halo. The line sits inside the track like it was drawn there.
• Royal Blood, "Out of the Black." A band whose entire documented sound is a bass guitar driving amplifier rigs. Listen for everything the Jamerson capture doesn't have: hair and harmonic grind on top, the sense of a speaker physically working, aggression that blooms when the playing digs in.
• One current chart track of your choosing. Most modern pop and hip-hop bass is DI, synth, or sim. Test that assumption with your ears, not your priors.

Run this checklist on each: (1) Is there air or room around the note? (2) Does the low end stay even across the range, or move with the room? (3) Is there harmonic hair, and does it respond to playing intensity? (4) Is the attack a fingertip or a speaker? Journal a verdict per track — DI-plain, amp'd, or blend — plus a confidence rating and the honest disclaimer sentence.

B2. The blend census. (15 min) Pick three bass sounds you love, any genre, from your own library. Classify each — DI-plain, amp'd, or blend — and cite your evidence in band vocabulary: where the consistency lives, where the character lives, what the attacks are made of. Bonus prediction: which of the three would survive a phone speaker best, and why? (The mono reckoning of Chapter 25 will grade that prediction eventually.)

B3. One guitar, how wide? (20 min) Three acoustic specimens, three width strategies:

• Nick Drake, "Pink Moon" (title track) — an intimate, narrow, centered image. One perspective.
• Oasis, "Wonderwall" — a huge acoustic bed filling the sides of the picture.
• Andy McKee, "Drifting" — modern solo fingerstyle, the guitar as the whole show.

The journal question for the second and third: one performance painted wide, or two performances panned apart? Evidence to hunt: do the left and right transients agree (one performance through a stereo pair) or drift apart in tiny human ways (two passes — micro-timing is the fingerprint of doubling)? What sits dead center? Then the fold test: one earbud, or your DAW's mono button. Doubles tend to sum thick and safe; wide time-difference captures can soften. Verdict per track, and one sentence on which width strategy your own current song actually wants.

B4. Combs on parade. (15 min) First, hear cancellation move: cue Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park" — one of the first famous uses of tape flanging on a pop single — and listen to the sweep on the drums and voice. That hollow, swooshing color is a comb filter marching through the spectrum: the exact peaks-and-notches pattern from this chapter, set in motion on purpose. Then the outro of Jimi Hendrix, "Bold As Love" — phasing as an aesthetic event. Now the real assignment: find one accidental comb in the wild this week. Candidates: a two-host podcast where both mics stay open (each voice carries a faint phasey halo of itself from the other mic), a drum-cover video where camera audio leaks under the mic'd kit (hollow, swirly cymbals), a speakerphone voice near a hard wall. Journal: describe the symptom in band vocabulary, and write the prescription you'd apply if you owned the session — flip, nudge, or mute the second capture entirely.

B5. The room as a decision. (20 min) Three drum sounds, three room philosophies:

• Stevie Wonder, "Superstition" — listen to how close and dry the kit sits: every drum at arm's length, the room nearly absent, the funk living in the directness.
• Led Zeppelin, "When the Levee Breaks" — Chapter 5's stairwell, re-heard with this chapter's ears: distance as aesthetic, the building itself in the low end, the room not as contamination but as the instrument.
• Phil Collins, "In the Air Tonight" — the gated-room thunder. The documented history: an enormous room sound discovered through a talkback compressor during the Peter Gabriel sessions Hugh Padgham engineered, then sculpted into the most copied drum sound of the eighties. A room, captured huge, then chopped — proof that room capture is raw material, not just ambience.

Journal: place each on the close↔room ladder, name the emotional job each room treatment performs for its song, and answer honestly — which of the three could you replicate in your space, and which would your room refuse?

B6. A kit, not twelve drums. (15 min) Cue Led Zeppelin, "Good Times Bad Times" — from the debut album Glyn Johns engineered, the record behind this chapter's first case study. Listen for the picture: one kit in one place, the snare anchored, the kick punching through a coherent image, cymbals attached to the drums they hang over. Then cue any modern hyper-produced kit from your library — recent metal or chart pop both work — and listen for the opposite: each drum spotlit, possibly sample-reinforced, the cymbals on their own plane. The chapter's table said neither is wrong, and it meant it. Journal: which feels like a human in a room, which feels like architecture, what each approach commits to — and which one your current song is actually asking for.

B7. The one organic element. (10 min) The Static Bloom doctrine, hunted in the wild: find two mostly-programmed tracks you love and locate the single real-air element — a strummed acoustic, a live shaker, finger snaps, audible room tone under a hook, a breath. One earbud at low volume helps the hunt. Journal: what does that one organic sound do to everything synthetic around it, and what would the track lose without it? If you genuinely can't find one, that's a finding too — write down what's doing the "human" job instead.

Part C: 🎛️ DAW Lab

Ground rules: record into your Chapter 6 template, name takes per your convention (bass_DI_tk2, not audio_047), and level-match before comparing. Phone users: capture in a voice-memo or field-recorder app, treat the phone's bottom edge as the capsule, and import the files — the lessons live in playback. Keep monitoring at conversation level, and keep every take; the session log you build here is the habit the chapter is installing.

C1. The comb factory. ★ (25 min) Build phase problems on purpose, so you recognize them forever. Take any recorded track with real transients — an acoustic strum is ideal. Duplicate it. Nudge the copy late by roughly 0.5 ms, then 1 ms, then 5 ms (drag with the grid off, or use your DAW's nudge — Appendix E has its name everywhere). At each offset, sum both copies to mono at equal level and listen against the original alone. Journal what each offset does — where the hollowness lives, how the character changes as the offset grows. Then, parked at the 1 ms offset: flip ∅ on the copy and listen again. The comb doesn't vanish — it exchanges: every notch becomes a peak, every peak a notch. That's the sidebar made audible. Deliverable: a three-line journal entry plus one sentence answering why neither flip state removed the comb.

C2. The flip-test reflex drill. ★ (25 min) The ritual, ten reps, against the clock. Set up any two-capture source: two mics on one instrument if you own two; one mic plus your phone taped beside it; a DI plus a sim'd duplicate; in a pinch, C1's nudged copies at offsets you choose blind. For every rep, the full motion: (1) sum to mono, (2) flip ∅ on one track, (3) attention on the low end, (4) keep whichever state is fuller, (5) back to stereo, log the verdict. Reps one through three: slow and deliberate, narrating each step out loud. Reps four through seven: under thirty seconds each. Reps eight through ten: under ten seconds, no checklist, no narration. The point isn't speed for its own sake — it's making the check cheaper than the doubt, because a ritual that feels expensive is a ritual you'll skip at midnight with a session open. You may sign your journal "flip test: reflex" only when rep ten was boring. The boredom is the deliverable.

C3. The cone safari — any speaker, any mic, phone included. (20 min) You own a speaker: a Bluetooth box, a hi-fi, a practice amp, anything with a cone. Play a fixed 20-second loop through it at modest volume — a riff, a drum loop, even pink noise. Find the cone (flashlight against the grille if you can't see it). Record the same 20 seconds three times with your capsule an inch or two out: dead center on the dust cap, the cap-edge seam, the cone's outer edge. Level-match, shuffle, listen blind, verdict in band vocabulary. Amp owners: this is your map — mark the keeper position with painter's tape and photograph it. Everyone else: the map transfers verbatim the day you meet a real amp, and it applies tonight inside any amp sim's virtual cab and virtual mic position. Virtual center cap, real bees.

C4. Twelfth fret versus soundhole, settled forever. (20 min) With an acoustic guitar — yours, borrowed, or any sound-boxed string instrument including a ukulele — record the same 30-second part twice: once with the mic at the soundhole, about six inches out; once at the twelfth fret, 8–12 inches, tilted slightly toward the body. Same performance energy. Level-match before judging — the soundhole take will be louder, and that loudness is exactly how the mistake survives in the wild. Blind A/B, then a full band-vocabulary autopsy of each. Record one bonus position from the chapter's map (behind the bridge, or over-the-shoulder) and add it to the comparison. Deliverable: your three-row verdict table — this room, this guitar, your ears. Non-guitarists: run C3 on a second, different speaker instead, and compare the two cone maps — the lesson is the same lesson.

C5. DI plus amp sim, blended and checked. ★ (30 min) Guitar or bass into the instrument input; record a 30-second DI with healthy levels (peaks near -10 dBFS). Duplicate the track and put any amp sim on the duplicate — stock or free is fine. Blend the two roughly equal, then run the protocol: (1) Sum to mono. (2) Flip test the pair — some sims model amplifier circuits that invert polarity, faithfully reproducing even the inconvenient parts, and if yours does, the flip is an instant, dramatic low-end return. (3) Zoom to a pick transient at sample level: do the wavefronts start together? Plugin latency should be auto-compensated by your DAW — verify it with your eyes once so you trust it forever. (4) If your sim has a cab or IR section, swap cabs and re-run the flip test; impulse responses are audio content, and content can shift in ways latency compensation can't see. Deliverable: gain notes like Theo's — DI peak level, blend balance, flip verdict, alignment note.

C6. The alignment surgery. (25 min) Two simultaneous captures of one source at deliberately different distances: your mic close at six inches, a second capture (second mic or phone) at three feet. Record 30 seconds of something with sharp transients — strummed guitar, a hand drum, even claps. In the DAW, build three versions and journal each: (a) the natural sum, in mono — describe the damage; (b) the flip-test version — run it, keep the fuller state; (c) the time-aligned version — zoom to a transient, drag the far capture until the wavefronts line up, listen again. Then the honest audition: aligned versus natural, level-matched. Which keeps the depth? Which keeps the weight? There's no universally correct answer — close pairs usually want full alignment, distance pairs want ears — but there is an answer for this capture and your taste. Write down which you'd ship, and why.

C7. The string law, scale model. (30 min) No drum kit required. Take one source — a speaker playing a drum loop works, so does a cajón, a hand drum, or a cardboard box you slap — and set up two captures equidistant from it. Measure with actual string or a mic cable, capsule to source center; don't eyeball it. Record, pan the two captures apart, and verify the source sits solid in the center of the image (check in mono too, and run the flip test once for discipline). Then break the law on purpose: move one capture eight inches closer, re-record the same material, and listen to what happens to the center — the hollowing, the drift, the thinning you now know by name. Kit owners: run the real scaled Johns — overhead plus floor-tom side, string-measured to the snare's center, panned per the chapter — and then break equidistance once, deliberately, so you know the failure sound forever. Deliverable: two adjectives for the lawful image, two for the broken one.

C8. The weekend dry run. (45+ min) Pick two sources you can genuinely record this week — any two: acoustic plus shaker, DI bass plus a sim'd double, voice plus banjo, phone-mic'd practice amp plus DI. Run a miniature Wren & Hollow block for each: the hygiene ritual first (tune, fresh battery in anything active, the noise-floor walk, phone to airplane mode), then the Field Guide starting position, then the routine — listen in the room, place, record twenty seconds, level-matched listen, nudge, take. Photograph each position. Log each source: input, gain knob position, peak dBFS, one line of notes. Deliverable: a session log complete enough that a stranger could recall your setup next month. This is the Project Checkpoint's rehearsal — the checkpoint is the show.

Part D: Synthesis & Critical Thinking

D1. The two-input weekend, designed. (30 min) A friend's folk trio is recording an EP: lead voice plus acoustic guitar (they insist on performing those two together, live), banjo, bass guitar, and brushes-on-snare percussion. Gear: one LDC, one 57-class dynamic, a 2-input interface, a decently treated living room, two days. Design the complete plan: what records live versus overdubbed; for the live voice-and-guitar pair, the full bleed strategy (mic assignments by family and response, null aims, a 3:1 audit with actual distances); the source schedule with an ears-budget argument for its order; every DI decision; every moment a flip test or alignment check is mandatory; and the hygiene ritual per block. Deliverable: a one-page plan a stranger could execute. Several plans earn full marks. A plan with no phase checks earns a rewrite.

D2. "More mics, more professional" — the honest essay. (25 min) Write both briefs, 150 words or fewer each. The case for the multi-mic drum kit: mix-time flexibility, per-drum spotlights, modern punch, sample-reinforcement options. The case for minimal: the phase debt that compounds with every open mic, committed-balance honesty, half a century of receipts, and what "the ear hears a kit" implies. Then the verdict — not in general, but for your room, your music, your input count — stated as a doctrine you'd defend out loud, with the tradeoff you're knowingly accepting written in the same breath. There are no rules, only consequences; your doctrine should name its consequences.

D3. Placement is EQ you can't undo — the unification. (20 min) Explain how these four are the same decision wearing different clothes: the mic's position on a speaker cone; the twelfth-fret aim on an acoustic; the bassist's plucking hand drifting from bridge to neck; mic height on a voice (Chapter 7). What does each one select, in Chapter 1's vocabulary? Then run the implication chain: if placement is EQ applied before capture, and capture is forever (Chapter 2), then what exactly is "fix it in the mix" promising — and what is it quietly admitting? End with the cheapest sentence in audio, in your own words: where you put the mic is a mix decision you make in advance.

D4. The Monday-morning diagnosis. (20 min) Four symptom reports arrive from a friend's weekend session. (1) DI plus mic'd bass cab sounds smaller together than either alone, worst in mono. (2) The acoustic guitar is boomy and barrel-like on every take. (3) The mic'd electric tone is fizzy and harsh on top regardless of amp settings. (4) The banjo takes carry a faint fuzz on note attacks that comes and goes between takes. For each: the mechanism, the category (time, polarity, placement, or hygiene), the fix, and what the fix costs. Then the meta-question: which of the four would the chapter's standing rituals have prevented outright — and which ritual, specifically?

Part M: Mixed Practice

Interleaving keeps earlier chapters load-bearing. No peeking until you've attempted each.

M1. (Chapter 1.) Recipe arithmetic, instrument edition. ★ (10 min) The bass guitar's low E sounds at roughly 41 Hz; the acoustic guitar's low E at roughly 82 Hz. For the acoustic's low E, list the next three harmonics and name the frequency band each lands in. Then explain dead strings strictly in Chapter 1 vocabulary: which part of the timbre recipe decays out of worn metal, and why no EQ boost can resurrect ingredients that were never captured.

M2. (Chapter 3.) The two-input wiring exam. (15 min) Diagram the DI-plus-mic bass capture from this chapter: the bass into the DI path (instrument input or DI box) on input one, the thru feeding the amp, the speaker pushing air, the 57 on input two. Label every gain stage, mark which level each cable carries (instrument, mic, line), note whether the 57 needs phantom power, and — the point of the exercise — mark exactly where in the diagram the one-foot-per-millisecond delay enters. Your drawing should make it visible why the DI arrives early.

M3. (Chapter 4.) Matched-loudness honesty. (10 min) Every comparison in this chapter says "level-matched." Name the bias that rule defends against, the mechanism Chapter 4 gave it (equal-loudness contours — level changes your ear's frequency response, not just its enthusiasm), and then design a placement A/B protocol that defeats the bias: how you'd match levels, how you'd blind yourself, and when the verdict gets written relative to the reveal.

M4. (Chapter 10.) The room in the low end. (10 min) Using Chapter 10's room-mode logic, explain why this chapter trusts a DI over a mic'd bass amp in a small bedroom: what standing waves do to the 40–200 Hz region at any mic position, why moving the mic changes which lie gets printed rather than whether one does, and which single Chapter 10 treatment helps low-frequency capture most. Be honest about the limit: what does $80 of rockwool genuinely do at 60 Hz, and what doesn't it?

M5. (Chapters 8 and 11.) The guest bassist session. (10 min) A friend brings their active bass over tonight. Write the five-line setup plan: which input and why; when and how gain gets set (whose playing, which section, peaks where, average where); which headphones for tracking and why; the two hygiene items specific to an active instrument; and the Chapter 11 law about clipping, quoted from memory. Every number in your plan is a habit, not a law — but write them anyway.

Selected answers (★): see the appendix "Answers to Selected Exercises." The Listening Lab has no answer key — it has your journal, which is better. And if you only have time for two exercises this week, make them C2 and C4: one builds the reflex, the other settles an argument you'll otherwise have with the internet forever.