Recordist’s Digest, Week of November 29^th, 2004.

Over the next two posts I hope to document the recording session of an especially talented Jazz trio based here in Dallas, Texas I have had the pleasure of recording. This post will cover the session and technical aspects of the recording; the room, instruments and microphone selections and placement used to capture the performance. In the second post, with the Artist’s permission, I hope to place certain examples of the sounds we recorded and a couple of clips of the music. A lot of work goes into preparing something like this, so please give feedback to help me make these post and useful as possible for everyone.

My first concern was the hall, and I’ve provided two pictures of the place – they are rather dark but alas the room is so large a simple flash bulb is hardly enough to take a good picture. The hall seats about 300 people, and so is rather small in the grand scheme of concert halls. The hall is also incredibly live, I was told the RT-60 of the room is 2.4 seconds, and I have no reason to doubt it. Almost every surface is some sort of concrete or finished wood, and the orchestra section is a smooth slab, not steps. Despite the hall’s volume, the sound of the reverberation is quite distinct and in all but one part of the hall has a very undulating character, like waves washing up on the shore. By the 3^rd or 4^th row, anything but the most legato of music is completely lost in a wash of room tone. I determined the curtain of the stage sounded best, with the most consistent and unobtrusive reverberation, and placed the instruments there.

The back of the hall offered rich wood paneling that was pleasing to the eyes but not the ears. As one approached the back of the stage, the room tone took on a particular warbling in the bass. It sounded like simple slap-echo, but in the 200 – 400hz range. This was an additional reason I had the band play as close to the curtain of the stage as possible. The stage mats became necessary as the band tended tap their feet quite a bit. The ambient microphone selection was a spaced pair of Earthworks TC30K omni-directional pointed upwards. They are quite close to the band because any further out and the room was just reverberant wash. Even with them so close, very little ended up being used in the final mix – the drum overheads and upright bass microphones provided plenty. As for placement, I simply moved them around until I got a good basic balance of the band and the stereo image was acceptable and compatible with the close microphones I placed. To my ears, close microphones were the only way to get a good recording in this particular hall of rhythmically complex music, and I didn’t further consider a simple two-microphone approach.

Those who enjoy a fine piano are in for a treat. This particular instrument is a late-sixties Steinway painstakingly restored. The sound is stunning. It is not a particularly bright piano, and I find this a welcome change for a jazz artist to prefer such a sound. Because of the very live room, I elected to place microphones close in a reasonably popular music fashion, but with a thought towards full mono compatibility in post. The selected application was a pair of Microtech Gefell M930 directional microphones on a stereo bar in X/Y configuration. These were placed just a few inches under the lid, and the list was kept in this position for the recording. They are positioned at about the break in the soundboard for the bass strings. This placement yielded a subtle stereo image of the piano from right to left, but also retained full mono compatibility for post should the artist decide he did not like the effect. The Gefell microphones performed so beautifully they are easily a first choice for me for piano in the future.

Drums were next on the list. The drummer performed with a fairly large kit, so placing a microphone on each instrument was clearly out of the question. Regardless, I am not a particular fan of too many microphones on drums, especially for jazz, so I chose a three microphone approach with two overheads and a Shure Beta 52 on kick drum, out about 16 inches from the resonant head. I think it is particularly noteworthy to show just how close the drummer set up to the piano – there is hardly a body’s width between the throne and the piano, and that large china practically rubs the finish off the piano when struck. Though we did initially try spacing the instruments out by about 5 to 10 feet to improve separation, each musician was not comfortable with the balance and even more surprisingly the bass and piano had timing issues introduced by the additional distance. (Makes you re-question the whole latency in monitoring argument, eh?) I simply told the musicians “get as close to the edge of the stage as possible, make yourselves happy and comfortable, and I’ll find a way deal with it.”

The overhead microphone selection may look a bit peculiar – it certainly surprised me. I originally chose an Earthworks Z30X pair for overheads because I felt the directionality would be helpful in taming the amount of room tone in the overheads versus my normal first choice of omni-directional microphones for overheads. While it sounded very good indeed, one of my microphones began having a little difficulty with noise, so I replaced it with a Rode NT-2 trying to diagnose the problem between microphone and preamp. Well, after listening to the results on playback, I was simply stunned. I’ve always been a fan of omni-directional microphones for percussion anyway, but now I had the best of both worlds. The rode, set to omni, provided the ping and snap I so appreciate of omni microphones, and the single directional microphone gave me the stereo image of the ride I wanted. Sometimes, circumstance and accidents turn genius, and this was no exception. I believe before tracking, I hung the overheads a bit lower.

For upright bass, I took a two-microphone approach, mostly just to have some options at post for sounds. While the bass sounded amazingly rich and warm when bowed, played in the jazz style the bass had a lot mud to the tone and was a bit too big. On top of this, the bass used a pickup and amplified his sound in the room. I did not care for the amp, though it was necessary for the other musicians to be able to hear him. I figured the leakage from the amp would just add some body to the room tone in the ambient microphones – which it did – and I proceeded to simply place microphones on the instrument as if it were completely acoustic.

The first microphone is an original Sennheiser 441. Often I would wrap this in a towel and stick it below the bridge, but because of the boomy nature of the bass tone, I backed off a bit and simply placed it pointing to the bridge where it sounded good in my headphones and minimized leakage from the rest of the trio. Since the 441 is a hyper-cardioid, positioning for maximum rejection is often a non-obvious exercise, and it’s best done in my experience with a pair of acoustic isolation headphones. My second choice for the bass was a more traditional selection, the Neumann M147 Tube pointed at the f-hold aimed up just a bit at the neck of the instrument. This microphone tended to sound the best, but also suffers from the greatest amount of leakage, something I was basically unable to control. I will say, however, now that I’m in mix/post there are two of the 5 songs where the 441 is perfect in timbre, making it an obvious first choice. For $300 off E-Bay, this microphone continues to amaze and please me.

To give you an idea of the isolation challenge, notice how tightly the trio chose to place themselves together. The leakage from microphone-to-microphone is fairly substantial, especially the amounts of room tone from drum solos leaking into the piano and bass microphones, impacting my carefully constructed stereo image of the drum set. I must admit, the piano microphones especially greatly impact the sound of the drums, reducing the articulation of the drum solos beyond what I consider acceptable. During post, I am using subtle mix automations to help reduce this effect, and I’m quite pleasantly surprised with how effective this has turned out to be.

The equipment used consisted of a Millennia Media HV-3D preamp, Apogee AD-16x converters, a Yamaha i88x digital interface and my laptop running Nuendo. 9 tracks were taken in: piano (2), drums (3), bass (2) and room (2). All but the 441 on bass used a HV-3 -> Apogee signal chain. For the 441 I used the microphone preamp in the i88x and the internal converters there. I must say I was more than pleasantly surprised by the quality of this unit, even though for the rest of the channels I simply used it as a digital ADAT-to-Firewire interface. The other real surprise here was the Millennia HV-3D. I’ve long been a fan of this unit, but lately I mostly do popular music production and I had started to grow away from the unit preferring other preamps such as my Pendulum, Great River NV, or API. But the stunning sounds that the Millennia HV-3 captured, the quality of the ambience retrieval, the amazing richness of tone captured from all of the microphones was truly a special treat. In much of the recording, the noise floor is so low one can hear the pianist breathing and even counting with his lips. So much of the true essence of three great musicians playing fantastic music came shining through the signal chain.

Let there not be any confusion on where I stand regarding accelerated sampling rates. J

All microphones were connected using Mogami cable, and I monitored from the stage access stairwell. My laptop was recently upgraded with a 100GB Seagate drive with a 26db ambient noise spec, so the system is actually pretty quiet. Still, why not throw my extra shirt at the back in a silly attempt to keep out any noise?

In my next post, I hope to provide individual samples of each of the instruments and microphone techniques plus a sample of the band as a whole, that way you can hear what these placements sounded like individually. The way the mix comes together can be quite surprising to those used to mixing music produced primarily through overdubs and isolated tracking. Sometimes the leakage is what makes the mix gel.