Music Tech [1][2]

A lot of things have happened in between blogs. I'll run through them as concisely as I can, to avoid this turning into an essay.

Continuing from where I left off, my group did a studio session in order to practice the microphone configurations, as well as taking some recordings. We never ended up using these, but I'll refer to that later. We also did a short Guitar recording which we also didn't include.

It was in that session where we decided the order, as we would undertake a field recording task while trying to be as "out of the way" as possible. The order we decided on was as follows:

This here is half-scale. The blue circle indicates a Neumann U87, the reds indicate an AKG 414 pair. This would be set up first because it would take the most time, and ideally if arriving before the people we record, we would use the time most effectively by doing the time-consuming setup when no one is there.

This also easily becomes Spaced Pair by turning off the U87. In the studio session, the middle mic was placed last.

We brought the mics together, angled approx. 110° from each other to form an ORTF, or Angled Pair configuration.

We then finally put the pair in a criss-cross, which we can use as either Mid-Side or Blumlein, depending on the polar patterns (explained in one of my previous posts). This means they can be done serially without changing positions, just like the first couple of configurations I mentioned.

There was a Guitar recording, though it didn't make the cut. We used a Fender Stratocaster with parallel DI, a 2*12 Vox combo amp, and an SM57 (angled and pointed at the speaker circle-edge about 5-6cm from the mesh), as those were in the studio. It also gave me a chance to use my laptop and the one of the uni's 4 input Tascam interfaces (now that I'm here, I should mention that the mics are also property of the uni, you may never see me handling a U87 ever again). This recording wasn't great, and we only had one take, which wouldn't be too useful for the podcast so it got scrapped.

With the experience, we were somewhat ready for the choir recording for their Christmas performance rehearsal.

The room here is the lecture hall, which is where the choir rehearse usually. It's around 20-28m in width and 10-14m in length, and has a stepped seating area through its length. We had to adjust the U87's height by considering the additional height the steps introduce.

After freaking out about XLR cable length, and finding an outlet to supply 9V power to the audio interface, we were able to somewhat smoothly transition from config to config.

One issue that I noticed, though, was that one of the inputs of the interface is a smidge dodgy and has a preposterously pestering bumble-bee-like-- okay I'll stop there - it was buzzing.

I avoided that input when I could, so the only buzzing occurs on the first two recordings (Decca and Spaced). I denoised the track in post, which requires a tricky balance to set between removing noise vs introducing artefacting.

After Christmas break, we put together a ([n] Acoustic) Drum and (Electric) Bass recording in one studio session. This involved a drum miking set and an AKG 414b, and the mixing table was an Allen & Heath QU-24 Digital Mixer.

The set included a DM-1B (kick drum), 4 DM-1T mics (for snares, toms, cymbals), and a pair of STC-10 (overhead) mics. These are dynamics, which smooth out transients.

The cab microphonerising involved a Laney 1*10, and demonstrated proximity effect on the 414b condenser (here in cardioid) by having it 4" then 1.5" from the grille. In this image, you can see my leg and Bass:

We booked this room again to record our scripts for the podcast which goes through these recordings. We set up the same mic in fig-8 polar pattern so that we can have a narrator each side, with someone swapping place to hit record every now and then.

We then used a studio session (which I had accidentally booked, but thankfully it got use here) to edit the near 8 minutes down to just 4 on the dot. We decided not to use the studio stereo miking recordings as that would add extra time, and we also couldn't quite get into the differences between condenser and dynamic mics work (slower transient response for the former). The time stretch tool in Logic proved to be especially useful when we needed to whittle an entire minute off.

The podcast is now finished, and so is this bit of the blog. Ciao!