support Tutorials CDs PPT mouthpieces

Tips for home recording

Thanks to you both. And no, where this stuff is concerned there is nothing too elementary so no apologies are needed. I'm going to try it again through my desktop and experiment with the various means of adjusting the recording level and report back.
 
@jbtsax Reviving this thread to ask your conclusions on the comparison between SM57 and AT2035 ?
 
the best the best tip I ever got re recording was from my old bass player who was a studio engineer- "recording the sound of a saxophone and what a saxophone sounds like in a particular room are two different things"....
 
the best the best tip I ever got re recording was from my old bass player who was a studio engineer- "recording the sound of a saxophone and what a saxophone sounds like in a particular room are two different things"....
I have a friend who is a sound engineer.. I'll have to ask him what he suggests as we have discussed it in passing in the past and he has said some instruments are tricky...
 
@jbtsax Reviving this thread to ask your conclusions on the comparison between SM57 and AT2035 ?
I has been quite a while since I did any recording. I remember that I ended up using the SM57 because in my room setting it was a warmer sound. To my ear the AT2035 exaggerated the highs a bit more. A few years later when we hired a professional to record our band for a demo I was a bit surprised that he used SM57's for each of the 4 saxes.
 
Microphone placement and the room is so much more important than the mic itself. Cardioid dynamic mics like sm57 are like yamaha saxes. Very forgiving. With very very well thought placement the result can be very very satisfying even by amateur users.
Even pros take considerable time placing their microphones. If you experiment with distance and angle you won't believe the difference... it's like .... a differrent reed :D
 
Microphone placement and the room is so much more important than the mic itself. Cardioid dynamic mics like sm57 are like yamaha saxes.
Absolutely true.

My advice to anyone with a home studio is to not worry about slight nuances between microphones, because your biggest issue is likely to be the room and the monitors.

Even if your room sounds good to you while playing the saxophone, the chances are it has huge issues when recorded.

Having set up a "home studio" that has to be a bit beyond a home studio as I'm doing masters for TV/film etc.

Rooms and soundwaves have strange anomalies. and what might sound to you like a great mic in one room, can work terribly in another. For example a big mistake people often make in home studios is to use ribbon mkics, because they tried one in an actual studio and it sounded great. Or they heard a great recording and decided to get one of those. But as they tend to pick up so much room, then what was good in that nice studio is actually what causes all the issues in your home studio.

To an extend DIY solutions can be great, but the big problem is often bass traps trying to deal with a big horrible boom around 100hZ. The kind of tgraps to deal with that need to be quite big, so often not so practical in a small home room.

I have that exact issue in my control room which is quite a bit smaller than my live room. It is very nice with mid/high damping as specified by a great studio architect, but the room is too small to deal with the boom caused by a suspended floor.

Everything else is great except a recorded tenor low A which just had this huge boomyness. Obviously if you EQ the track taking that into account, then when you listen somewhere else it just sounds very thin.

My solution was to get tuneable strudio mon itors (JBLLSR4328). Once you've tuned them to the room which they do themselves via a process of a mic placed at your listening position and then emitting a sine wave sweep through all frequencies. Then what you hear from the monitors has taken all the room EQ anomalies into account.
 
Everything else is great except a recorded tenor low A which just had this huge boomyness. Obviously if you EQ the track taking that into account, then when you listen somewhere else it just sounds very thin.
Have you tried a tenor to low Bb?
 
For those that wanna "treat" their untreated rooms ... the solution is something like ARC.

They provide their measurement microphone ... and with simple instructions it can help with the problems in your room. Cheers
 
The other consideration is how your sax will sit in a mix, or perhaps more importantly - atop the mix. You'll have less space if a piano is in the small combo rather than a nylon string-guitar, and if it's a full band/orchestra then you'll have even less room. If you don't fix this by wailing above everything in a harmonics solo, then you'll need to think about what pushes the sax forward in the mix other than just pushing the volume. I think that this must be why Brecker used a U87 rather than say, a ribbon or a valve like a U67 or C12 - though this has a lot of "air" in the sound.

As Pete says though, the worst affect you'll have to cope with is the room acoustic. If you end up capturing some room sound, any processing will be processing that too, and slightly nasty goes to really nasty usually in a few clicks.

The funny thing is, many "stars" will want to use a mic because X used it. They, of course are not X, and so not only is the act pointless, it might actually be really detrimental.
 
I've had a brief chat with my sound engineer friend about 'how to record sax' and his response was, "Tricky..." He then qualified that by saying most wind/brass instruments are tricky but that sax is easier than trumpet or trombone.

His preference for 'serious' recording is: 3 mics with EQ set flat

1)a clip-on on the bell
2) a mic on a stand a little in in front of the bell
3)a simple crossed pair above to capture 'ambience'

You take these as three separate streams during recording. You adjust the levels of the three in mixing in post production. You can adjust EQ there if necessary, but the levels of the three streams are probably more important.

If using one mic, his view is that clip-on mics tend to give a thin sound due to where they are located. A mic such as an AKG on a stand in front of the bell produces a fuller and warmer sound.
 
I've had a brief chat with my sound engineer friend about 'how to record sax' and his response was, "Tricky..." He then qualified that by saying most wind/brass instruments are tricky but that sax is easier than trumpet or trombone.

His preference for 'serious' recording is: 3 mics with EQ set flat

1)a clip-on on the bell
2) a mic on a stand a little in in front of the bell
3)a simple crossed pair above to capture 'ambience'

You take these as three separate streams during recording. You adjust the levels of the three in mixing in post production. You can adjust EQ there if necessary, but the levels of the three streams are probably more important.

If using one mic, his view is that clip-on mics tend to give a thin sound due to where they are located. A mic such as an AKG on a stand in front of the bell produces a fuller and warmer sound.
How about recording straight soprano?
 
I've had a brief chat with my sound engineer friend about 'how to record sax' and his response was, "Tricky..." He then qualified that by saying most wind/brass instruments are tricky but that sax is easier than trumpet or trombone.

His preference for 'serious' recording is: 3 mics with EQ set flat

1)a clip-on on the bell
2) a mic on a stand a little in in front of the bell
3)a simple crossed pair above to capture 'ambience'

You take these as three separate streams during recording. You adjust the levels of the three in mixing in post production. You can adjust EQ there if necessary, but the levels of the three streams are probably more important.

If using one mic, his view is that clip-on mics tend to give a thin sound due to where they are located. A mic such as an AKG on a stand in front of the bell produces a fuller and warmer sound.

This is very non-standard. Engineers will use more than one mic if they don't have a clear view of how a session is going to go. I don't see that brass instruments are hard to capture either as the sound emanates from one place - the bell. A Ribbon mic is standard practice as it will take being barked at and flattens out peaks in volume as well as smoothing harsh sounds. There is never one answer though - Al Schmitt uses a Neumann U67.

AKG probably produce upwards of 50 microphones, and if you include their back catalogue considerably more. With the sax and clarinet the added problem is that sound comes out of the body of the instrument and the bell, so mic placement is crucial to the type of sound that you might prefer. Clarinet is worse, like the soprano (straight) sax as the bell notes are further away from the keys. This can be combatted by standing back from the mic more or two mics might be used. A Ribbon mic on the clarinet is again, like trumpet, violin, pretty standard practice though other techniques can be used. For many of his albums Eddie Daniels has used close-micing for a really intimate sound. I emailed one of his engineers several years ago about the setup used for his album Blackwood:

"The mic technique and the placement were actually cribbed from the late Keith Grant who recorded Eddie's "Breakthrough" album in London in 1985. Eddie was really fond of the sound so I used it on subsequent CDs.

It's basically two Telefunken U47 mikes placed head-to-head in a somewhat modified X/Y position about a foot in front of the clarinet and basically in the middle of the instrument.
It's recorded on two tracks and then panned hard left and right. Of course, Eddie had to keep fairly still otherwise the image would shift around a lot."

Producer Al Schmitt is always an interesting read.

Mix Masters: Al Schmitt
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom