Posted by Daryl on May 27, 2003 at 11:11:07:
In Reply to: Recording a brass quintet posted by John Adams on May 27, 2003 at 10:07:58:
Hi John,
I have never had the opportunity to record a quintet - however, if I did I would do the following things;
1.) Find a GREAT room - We're doing drums for a demo project that I'm working on and we're learning the value of a good acoustical space the hard way. Find a mid-sized church in your area and ask if you'd be allowed to do some tracking. As long as you're nice about it and make them feel confident in you as a responsible person they're usually willing to lend their space. You want a room with some reverberation but not LOTS - personally, I like wood ceiling and accents if possible. Find a room that sounds good and your recordings will probably sound good too - or at very least it will make it harder to screw them up ;)
2.) Use your ears - your ears are the best gauge as to where the mics should be placed. In general, you want to get them out and away from the group to capture the blend, but not too far so that you can still capture the seperation of the instruments. This will be highly dependant on the room you record in - the more reverberant, the closer the mics should be; the more "dead", the further away the mics should be. Use your ears and move around until you hear the sound you want on your final product - that's typically (with a few adjustments) where you want the mics.
You'll probably find that you'll end up setting the mics up about 6' away from the group, about 8' in the air (oh yeah, make sure you have boom stands), and about 4-5' apart. One tip - bring some aluminum foil just in case. I did a session one time and there was interference from the local radio station that was picked up by the mic cables; I got a nice leakage of the "Polka Hour" on the tracks, but a little aluminum foil shielded them.
Daryl