A violinist without an orchestra

  • Thread starter Thread starter FLYcrash
  • Start date Start date
F

FLYcrash

New member
Hi all!

One of the great avocations of my life has been music. I've been a classical violinist in one orchestra or another for more than half my life and even entertained becoming a musician when I applied to college. Sadly, I just quit my local orchestra - a combination of a mediocre conductor, poor attendance and morale among the members, a tough work schedule, and my friends moving away made it not worth my while anymore. It was a difficult decision, but I think it was the right one.

So anyway, I'm keen on keeping up the interest/pressure on myself so I don't stop playing altogether. One thing I've been interested in is to record myself with good (enough) audio quality. That would give me useful feedback about my playing and offer some challenging projects that would keep my playing up, say recording a Bach sonata as well as I can and sending it to my far-away loved ones.

In terms of equipment and recording experience, my starting point is minimal. One-bedroom apartment, violin, $80 Sony boombox that actually sounds pretty good, four-year-old laptop. In middle school and high school, I had to make tapes of excerpts for a grade for orchestra class with a $15 lousy microphone, and I know I want better sound quality than that. I'm of modest income (I'm a Ph.D. student), but I have savings from when I was a high school math teacher. I tend to be, umm, generous with myself when it comes to hobbies. Let's say a rough upper bound on the budget is US$1000 for the whole kit and caboodle.

So basically, I'm a blank slate. I'd love to hear your recommendations. Many thanks in advance! :)
 
Hi FLYcrash -

A lot depends on what you want to do. If you just want to jump in with some cheap stuff and make recordings for shits and giggles, you'll need a computer, and a laptop won't give you as much performance as a desktop for the same price. If it's got a 5400 rpm drive, you may be able to simply upgrade your lappy with a snazzy 7200rpm hard drive and have no issues, depending on the capability of the laptop's processor.

You'll need some kind of recording interface, and at your budget - and considering you may want to build a computer with a good portion of it - I'd be looking at a usb interface in the 2-300 dollar range. Choices abound:

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/UA25EX/
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/FastTrackPro/
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/US1641/

I just grabbed some links, I don't necessarily prefer one to another. Some come with recording software, others don't. If not you'll have to pony up or try an excellent free program like Reaper.

You're going to need some kind of condenser microphone.

You'll need some kind of monitors, eventually - cause pc speakers don't really cut it.

If, on the other hand, you are looking to make high quality recordings, my advice would be to save up for one quality bit of gear at a time, so that you don't buy twice. Resist the urge to try to cover everything at once.

You're in the right place, welcome aboard.

-SC
 
All of the above is the right advice....one thing, many interafces comes with recording software and you can demo most of them if Reaper turns out not to be your thing, though it's free to a point it's $60 to have it licensed.

One of interest may be Presonus Studio One Artist which comes free with their interfaces...a recent update seems to have improved it quite a bit and its workflow is intuitive and quick to learn
 
Thanks much! :) I had figured the condenser microphone would be important, but that led to the question of what to plug it into.

So it sounds like the basic audio pipeline is condenser microphone -> recording interface -> good computer -> software -> monitors. Am I missing anything? Do I need a separate mic preamp? Could the monitors be exchanged with good headphones in the interest of space?

SC, I'm definitely the kind of guy to save up for quality bits of gear one at a time. I hate upgrading! On the other hand, I certainly won't pretend to be a pro-level musician playing in an acoustically tailored studio. I also have no foreseeable need for multitrack recording, I think. From that point of view, which parts of the above benefit the most from investments in quality? I am scratching my head in terms of the computer. I certainly appreciate computer performance (part of my research is doing numerical simulations on high-peformance clusters), but it will be hard to swing a desktop, as my apartment doesn't have much space.

Thanks again, and keep it coming! This has already clarified my thinking much more than the catalogs and generic FAQs.
 
I'm wondering if you even need to go the computer route.
Are you planning on doing full-scale, multi part compositions?
Multi-tracking different instruments?
Adding a bunch of EQ and Compression and effects and whatnot to get various parts to sit together in a mix?
Doing in depth and extensive editing of the parts you record (as in down to the level of the waveform to remove extraneous noises, snip out a sour note to replace it with one played right)?

I'm getting the impression you are wanting to record to capture your live performances as accurately and cleanly as possible.

For this, I would recommend going relatively cheap on the recording medium - maybe something along the lines of this stuff:
http://www.sweetwater.com/c1006--Portable_Recorders
And then investing more in your mics and maybe external preamps.

There's also your monitoring chain, which can be very important in a multitrack situation but which, in yours I think takes on slightly less importance.
You aren't really going to be doing a whole lot of mixing, it seems, and it's gonna come down to tracking as cleanly and well as possible.

I'm envisioning you finding a way of recording yourself playing that sounds as good as you expect/hope it to and just duplicating that particular setup for each piece you want to record.

Now, if I'm wrong about where your interests lie and you are getting into recording for the sake of recording and can envision yourself moving on to record other things (ie, multi-instrument compositions or other people, bands, drums etc...), then the expandability and flexibility of the computer based system is more likely what you want, and you should ignore me.

But simply recording single instrument compositions, I can't see a reason why you couldn't get those darn near perfect-sounding going in, so I wouldn't see a need for all the extra flexibility of the computer based setup.
 
PhD student? Do you have access to school rehearsal facilities? Classrooms/halls during off hours? If so, buy a portable recorder and do your recording in a (much) larger room. Something like the Zoom H4 that has XLR inputs. Transfer to your computer if you need to process, edit, burn, whatever. Headphones are normally not recommended, but given you're not really doing much mixing, they would probably work. You can mix check on your boombox, car, etc.

Apartment recording can be done, but it's usually not as satisfying. This guy used to hang here, this was all recorded in his living room (the violins anyway, the rest is synth):

http://www.ilike.com/artist/David+Kempers?src=onebox
 
The Cancers, you hit the nail on the head. My priority at this point is very much to avoid hitting sour notes as opposed to editing them away. The objective is to capture a solo performance with the best possible sound quality for my budget. I was thinking about such digital recorders before I started reading online, but the only ones I knew about were the $40 digital voice recorder types. So thanks very much for the link!

Edit: That's an interesting point, mshilarious...I'm sure I could swing at least a classroom or lecture hall late at night. I don't have keys to the performing arts venues, on the other hand. Recording on campus would put a premium on portability.
 
Actually, if you had responded like you did, I was going to recommend exactly what MSHillarious beat me to the punch saying.
That is:
a) you should be able to determine exactly what setup going into your recording device sounds best simply by keeping notes and trying out your recordings on any sound system you can get access to (boombox, car stereo, your friend who works sound at that bar downtown, etc...). This isn't practical when mixing big projects, but one track at a time should be easy enough.
and
b) you're gonna end up finding that you need a larger room than your apartment to get great sound. But with a portable recorder, that's not all that hard to do.

Good luck, and have fun!
 
FLYcrash said:
I tend to be, umm, generous with myself when it comes to hobbies. Let's say a rough upper bound on the budget is US$1000 for the whole kit and caboodle.
Click to expand...

Here's a recording I made recently.
Walking in the Air
I used:

1. Crap mic (less than $100)
2. M audio interface ($199)
3. Sonar 8.5 ($400)
4. Noisy apt living room
5. Samples and effects (I won't lie, that shit was pretty expensive:D)
6. Me (cheap date)
7. Violin (super expensive)
8. Thousands of hours of experience.

The first 3 will take you a long way if you learn the ropes, especially about EQ. I can get rid of a lot of unwanted noise, especially the noisy fridge in the background. The main noise to get rid of is the surface noise of the fiddle, which one doesn't hear in a hall but will definitely hear in a small room with close mic.
 
Last edited:
DavidK said:
Here's a recording I made recently. I used:

1. Crap mic (less than $100)
2. M audio interface ($199)
3. Sonar 8.5 ($400)
4. Noisy apt living room
5. Samples and effects (I won't lie, that shit was pretty expensive:D)
6. Me (cheap date)
7. Violin (super expensive)
8. Thousands of hours of experience.

The first 3 will take you a long way if you learn the ropes, especially about EQ. I can get rid of a lot of unwanted noise, especially the noisy fridge in the background. The main noise to get rid of is the surface noise of the fiddle, which one doesn't hear in a hall but will definitely hear in a small room with close mic.

Walking in the Air
Click to expand...

Damn it's good to hear your voice--uh, your keystrokes--oh hell, you know what I'm trying to say!
 
FLYcrash,

1st Listen to david K's stuff:
2nd Listen to it again & decide if that level of quality, (bloody high), is what you're aiming for:
3rd buy what you can afford
4th press record & give it a whirl:
5th go back & listen to David K's broad range of work and read his previous posts, suggestions, threads and critiques
THEN
Have at it.
Cheers
rayc
 
Sounds good, all...I really like the track, DavidK! It is quite amazing that you put such a work together in your apartment.

I'm heartened to hear that one can get good results without a roomful of top end gear. Most likely, I'll get a digital recorder, something like the Zoom H4n, that offers at least a minimal workflow, and see how far that gets me. Then I will be able to see if/how I want to improve the setup with a good aftermarket microphone, software postprocessing, etc.

I welcome comments on this plan. In any case, I'll bump when this comes together. It might be a few months before that happens...I'm kinda broke right now. :o

Thanks again to all of you! :)
 
Software processing is free . . . Audacity is free, Reaper is practically free, there are tons and tons of free VST plug-ins (effects).
 
FLYcrash said:
I'm heartened to hear that one can get good results without a roomful of top end gear.
I welcome comments on this plan. In any case, I'll bump when this comes together. It might be a few months before that happens...I'm kinda broke right now. :o

Thanks again to all of you! :)
Click to expand...
If you're ever in London, give me a shout and bring your violin ! I love violin {used beautifully by the likes of Horslips, Mahavishnu Orchestra, String Driven Thing, Jean Luc Ponty, Trevor Watts String ensemble, Kansas, Shadowfax, Mothers of Invention, Mushroom, Spud, Pavlov's Dog, Salem Hill, It's a beautiful day, David Rose, The Flock and Jean-Pierre Rudolph.......but not Lysis !} and the only thing top end about my set up is the ceiling ! :D

Seriously though, have fun and learn lots !
 
Hey grimtraveller,

Thanks for the invitation! It is very cool to know that I'd have somewhere inviting to be if I find myself across the pond. :)
 
Hi all,

Thanks again for all of your help. I've read and learned a lot in the past couple of weeks. One thing that I'm having trouble getting information about: the choice of a portable recorder. The Zoom H4n seems to get a lot of buzz (and sells for top dollar on eBay). Is it really the best thing out there? I'd be willing to spend somewhat more if it could get me a more durable device with good, low-noise circuitry. On the other hand, I'd be willing to spend less, too, if I could still get good quality. :)

I guess I've heard weak reviews of some of the other of Zoom's products and didn't know how that translates to their recorders. I see some other brands competing in this area, and I don't know much about most of them. I do know and like Sony; everything I've gotten from them, from my alarm clock to my boombox, has been solid as a rock and has worked well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top