need help with choir

[Jblount]

I have been working with a gospel group for the past week. I am having fun recording them, and they have been blown away with the quality I am giving them. Big ego boost. I am not doing anything all that special, just their past experiences have been less than desirable. Anyway, they want to re-record their last cd because the quality is so bad. No problem with the instruments or lead vocals, but what is the best way to record a 15 piece choir? I dont have 15 pairs of headphones, or 15 condensor mics, lol. I do have 2 condensors and several yamaha wedge monitors. Is it possible to capture the choir using the condensors while playing the que in the monitors? Will the music bleeding out of the monitors be too much in the mics? Or should I use reg mics? Help please, I want to give them the same level of quality.

[maestro_dmc]

Why not rip the original CD in as a "guide" track, recording the vocals in stereo part by part with the 2 condensers?

If you do that the vocalist will hear all the parts, and the CD tracks should be able to be matched up with the instruments and lead vocals, so at the end you can just dump the "guide" tracks and have a stereo pair of each vocal part for mixdown.

If there are 3 parts , you should have enough headphones. I doubt if you will like what you get with floor wedges.

If they like what you've done so far they should trust you on this one too.

[skippy]

The large chorus/choir recordings I've done have led me to some kind of curious ideas about it. If you have a good room, and it sounds like you do, I'd recommend trying something radical and heretical: put everybody up on the risers just like they always set up for performance, feed them the bed tracks through a pair of floor monitors set up out of phase with each other, and record them with an ORTF pair of small-diaphragm condensers hung maybe 3 feet over the director's head, and maybe 3 feet behind him. Move the mics and the monitors until you get the least bleed and the best chorus sound.

Why? My experience has been that large-ensemble vocalists _always_ work the best when they can properly hear their risermates, especially when they haven't spent the last 10 years singing in headphones. I have found that to try and take the chorus off the risers, and do them by isolated sections, gets you a technically interesting but lifeless performance. These folks usually know *exactly* how it should sound and feel on the risers, and the director has done the vocal placement on the risers to get the best sound to their ears- so set a simple stereo pair up right near the director's ears, and let it fly. There's a vibe there that you don't want to sacrifice.

The out of phase floor monitors will minimize bleed. If you need to, you can experiment with hypercardioids in the pair for the same reason. But I have found that simple and honest works best in a good room...

Even better would be to set up the backing musicians and track the whole thing live, goboing and tinkering with stage volumes as needed. That'll arguably give you the best feel. Gospel is a lively art: trying to make it too perfect usually irons the life out of it, as does pulling it apart into pieces.

Just my opinion- your mileage may vary. Last time I recorded a large chorus (150 voice women's a capella chorus, with Lunatic assisting), I hung everything in the mic locker: section specials, mics everywhere, ironmongery out the wazoo- printed to 16 tracks. And I hung my usual ORTF pair above and behind the director, just for a safety. We tracked it, brought it back to mix- and scrapped pretty much everything but the simple pair. We just kept a little bit of the spotmics above the bass section, because it helped fill out the bottom: but if it sounded good enough to the director to keep, it'll usually work. You don't _want_ to hear individual voices in a choral recording, usually.

If you want to set up some close-in section specials, go for it- but I think you may be amazed at how good a result you can get with doing a simple setup in a good room. It's all about the performance, and capturing it without killing it! Hope that helps... let us know how it goes.

[Han]

Skippy is right! Very good advice!!

Headphones don't work in a choir.