notesdontmatter

AArts – Wk 5 – “Wind Instruments”

If I develop strong aspirations for a career in audio engineering in the future, recording classical musicians seems like a rewarding area of speciality.

Fellow engineers for this week: Luke, Jake and William.

Instruments recorded: Flute (Lydia Sharrad) and Saxophone (Martin Cheney).


We started off with what seemed to work for the group session on Tuesday with a twist: two dynamic mic’s (Shure SM-57 and a Beta 58) facing toward the bell of the sax. My logic behind this idea came from a section in this weeks reading which referred to SM-57’s as being potentially suitable for rock saxophone recording. Martin was a classically trained saxophonist but it worked nevertheless. During the recording and postproduction I found dropping out all mic’s minus the AKG-C 414 (which for the sax I believe produced a fantastically warm “chocolate velvet” quality) allowed one to dial in organic reverb from the room mic (U-87) and overhead (KM-84), and a desirable amount of ‘edgy snarl’ from the dynamics. The group consensus at the time was adverse to the inclusion of the SM-58 as in the studio mix it added nothing desirable. After playing around with levels in postprod’ however I think it complemented the 57 nicely.

We tried a few alternate placements such as sticking the room mike almost inside the bass trap (success!), inverting the positions of the AKG and SM-57 (I liked the first way better) and utilising another AKG as an alternative room mic for a duller response (I preferred this to the U-87 despite the audio not coming in quite as clean).


We kept the same configuration when recording Lydia, but also tried using two room mic’s for alternate ambience, and switched their positions for the second take. The dynamic mic’s weren’t really up to the task for flute recording but David G. did mention that on Tuesday I believe (me such a rebel)…


Click Here for online link to audio examples folder.


Reference:

David Grice. “Recording Wind Instruments”. Tutorial presented at EMU space and Studio 1, 5th floor, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide. 30th March 2007.

Keith Gemmell. “Recording Brass and Woodwind”. Music Tech Magazine, July 2003.

posted by David J Dowling @ 4:13 PM