| Home recording and general music post from the archived Yabb Recording Website Message Board. Some of the info here may be outdated but many of the audio recording and home studio tips are still good. Note: The only tags I made and attempt to convert are italics, bold, center and underline. So if you see some gibberish surrounded by brackets, just ignore it.
Recording Website Archived Yabb board Post
Febuary 2001 Yabb Message Board Archive
Subject: recording the recorder
by roy | 04/04/01 at 12:58:20
I'm a professional recorder player in Boston and am interested in doing home recording of myself. I have tried many mics at places like Guitar Center and Mars. I played through many condenser and dynamic mics and ALL of them have a sound which I have to describe as distorted. I have done alot of studio work and in most cases the sound seems nice and clear, but I have some recordings made professionaly which also have that distorted sound. Does anybody have experience recording recorders? Is thre a type of mic that can get all of the harmonics and still have a nice clean transparent soun? Do you have to EQ the signal in a certain way to take out some highs?
Subject: Re: recording the recorder
by Percy | 04/04/01 at 20:05:03
Good question Roy.
Ive never recorded a recorder..hmmm... perhaps there is somthing about the instrument that is difficult to record. Do you remember what kind of mic you used in the studio with acceptable results??
What I would try as a begining would be to use a good condenser and keep a fair distance from it or mess around with distance,angles etc making sure all your recording equipment is adjusted correctly. A commpressor might help.
Sorry I couldnt be more of a help.
Percy
Subject: Re: recording the recorder
by Jim | 04/04/01 at 20:45:25
I think Percy may be on the right track. If I remember correctly I saw a clip of Led Zeps bass player playing one in and he was playing it at a 45-90 degree angle to the mic field at about 6-8 inches away and I would also bet that in the studio there was some type of filtering of the upper frequecy register and compression on the levels.
You might also try reducing the eq level to maybe -10 to -15 db and boost individual freqs one at a time until you sculpt the sound you want then cut the rest and try bringing the level up towards 0db.
I would think you ought to approach it much like a piccalo or a flute. And I think I even saw a post here once on that this subject. You might try a search. If I come across anything I'll let you know as I would like to know the answer to this as well. Keep us posted on what you find.
Subject: Re: recording the recorder
by roy | 04/05/01 at 09:07:05
Thankyou, Jim and Percy.
The last time I was in a studio I was recording a sound track for a cable TV series. They were using Neumans. I will certainly pay more attention to what the engineers are doing from now on. I probably will not be shelling out money for Neumans, but I'll play around with placement and EQ until I get what I want. Can anybody suggest a mic that is used for wind instruments which will not put me in debtor's prison?
Thanks again.