Doing The Flip: New uses for that little Ø button...

This article presents a couple of new uses for an old technique, flipping the polarity of a microphone’s signal. (Not the “phase”; that refers to different arrival times, and the havoc they can wreak—see “Outwitting the Phase Monster” in our November and December 2014 issues).

Flipping the polarity means turning the electrical wave that represents a sound upside down with a switch, an adapter or maybe a DAW. You may be used to this already, if you put a mic on the bottom of a snare drum and need to get its output to line up with the top snare mic’s signal without creating comb filtering problems. Ditto for a front-of-kick mic and a beater mic, etc.