Orchestra Recording

A

acattoir

New member
Hi, I'm an orchestra recording novice. I feel as though my recordings have too much punch?? or maybe the sound is too
solid. The sound I am trying to emulate is more delicate and polite. I am using cardioid condensers, mxl, superlux and rode. I have tried coincident stereo pair and spaced pair, same punchy sound just different imaging. I will invest in a pair of good omni's, if that is the solution. Is there some processing that would help? The omni mics I am considering are the Shure ksm141's. I read lot's of good things about earthworks, but the self noise looks higher than the competion by quite a bit. I cannot afford anything like the Royer ribbons, Scheops or other exotic stuff. Thanks for the input.
Andy
 
First off, you need to give more info and details like, what are you recording to? What's the orchestra, a 100 piece symphony orchestra or a 12 persons school big band?
How's the room?

It seems to me that you think you will get a better sound by better mics, but you seek in the wrong direction IMHO.

Indeed great mics will help, but it's all about engineering skill and mic placement.
 
Thanks, To be brief. 28 piece all strings, 60 piece all strings, 110 piece all strings. These are all school orchestras so I know part of the difficulity is the actual sound coming from the instruments. One room was a fairly dead theater, lots of curtains. one gym with some sound treatment, and one fairly reverberant recital hall. I am using an Allen and Heath console, direct out with no eq into a Fostex d2424lv hard disk recorder. Mic placement, "spaced"
about 10 feet apart and 12 feet off the floor 3 feet behind the conductor with the mics pointed roughly at the back row of the group. The "pair" placement was the same only with the mics 7 inches apart at about 90 degrees to each other. Sorry for the triple post.
Andy
 
Andy, there are a number of stereo placements which you can find on the DPA website under 'microphone university'

www.dpamicrophones.com

You can choose for an A B pair of omni's, which you already did, but this will only work in a good sounding room. Experiment with the distance between the mics.

Behind the conductor is a good place to start.

An ORTF pair of cardiods will give you a realistic stereo image in the room that doesn't sound too good. A NOS pair of the same mics will perhaps be better in smaller rooms.

An MS pair can sound wonderful in a good room and you can make the stereo mage very wide.

The XY technique is also used by many engineers, but I don't like the stereo image on orchestras and choirs.

Now these are your main mics and in fact you may only need just a couple of spot mics, for example on timpany.

Since you have 24 tracks you may also like to have both an A B pair and an ORTF pair, so you can make your choice afterwords.

You may have to time align the spot mics to the main pair, but that's a piece of cake in a DAW.

If you put a pair of spot mics for example on chello's, beware of phase problems. In another thread someone suggested that you can can solve phase problems by time aligning the tracks, but this ain't possible.

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks a lot for all of the ideas!! Pardon my ingnorance but NOS is a new one for me. Could you tell me what that stands for? If I want to time align any spot mics, I would need to do that with some outboard device at mixdown I guess.......in my working environment. Do you think something modest like a TC electronic or Alesis delay would suffice, considering my other limitations.
Also shall I avoid any sort of limiting or compression with my classical music recordings? Thank you again
andy
 
Andy, did you visit the DPA site? It's all there, Jecklin disc, Blumlein, Decca tree, MS, ORTF, NOS

NOS is a placement of two cardioids, 30 cm (1') apart and a 90 degree angle.

Time aligning can be done in a PC with software like Cool Edit, ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase SX and there are so many more.

I don't know if you can do it also within the Fostex, I do know it can be done in a Tascam MX2424 with the help of a PC, so perhaps it can be the same with the Fostex.

Maybe someone else can be of any help here, for I'm an analog dude and a tape slut. :D

Avoid recording with compression or other processing, if needed you can do that when mixing.
 
Haven't been to DPA, but it is on my short list. I am pretending that my Fostex is a tape machine, hence the delay question. I know I'm being sort of a retro-grouch, but I'm trying to leave my computer out of the mix for now. Thanks again
Andy
 
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