Do you really need expensive stuff?

[groovyisland]

for a band thats loud anyway what about a temporary piezo contact pickup?

temporary tape inside or outside

ive had much better than expected results with piezos

 

[Han]

for a band thats loud anyway what about a temporary piezo contact pickup?

temporary tape inside or outside

ive had much better than expected results with piezos

Thanks for replying, I've been trying quite some piezo's and that may be a solution for live performance, but not for recording.

At gearslutz we've had a long discussion about the subject and the concensus is that there are no pickups for upright that sound good enough for recording.

Recording the upright in a booth, or as an overdub is no problem at all, you simply put a nice mic in the right spot and you're done.

So I was very curious about how Harvey handles the situation, because after all these years (I'm 64) I'm still not completely happy with the live recording of an upright. If there's a pickup that sounds like a nice upright in the open, I'll be the first to buy it, no matter what it costs.

 

[groovyisland]

waldorf towers

 

[bodaddy]

Wow, really enjoyed listening to the tracks. The second one, I played at church for a long time. I lead worship some. The only thing I can say I might have done drastically different is to midi the keys thru my computer and use a more realistic horn sound. But again, good job. They can't complain with that. I would also like to see picks of how you set those dividers up. I am moving my studio to my house and am redoing an attached apartment to accomodate. Thanks again.

 

[Harvey Gerst]

Given the proliferation of Chinese manufactured condenser mics that copy classic circuits with cheaper components but with cloned capsules (albeit with questionable quality control for some companies), it seems understandable that some of these mics would offer performance that exceeds their price-- particularly transformer-less designs (I understand that the Chinese cloned transformer manufacturing processes has not developed at an equal pace its capsule manufacturing processes), and particularly since many of the transformer-less Chinese mic circuits are basically now the same as the Schoeps/Dorsey circuit design.

With pres, I read something interesting in the Langevin DVC manual talking about how many solid state preamps-- particularly less expensive ones will use negative feedback to "lower noise and distortion at the cost of transient accuracy." Is this essentially similar to 'phase cancelling' noise, but also parts of the desired sound? That these designs used "hundreds of dB's of negative feedback...The result is good specs - but that harsh, hard cold sound that makes shakers sound like pink noise, make vocals sibilant in an unpleasant way, and can only render a 2 dimensional image at best."

Ok, this is a two part answer to the above paragraphs.

As much as I love and respect my friend Scott Dorsey, the "Schoeps/Dorsey circuit design" isn't a cure all for every mic that comes outta China. Some of their transformer-equipped mics are very good, and some are horrid. There's a whole bunch more to it than transformer vs. no transformer.

Negative feedback, in small doses, can be fine and reduce distortion dramatically. But some op amps require massive amounts of negative feedback to bring the response and distortion into tolerable limits for audio work. And some circuits which use multiple op amps use multiple negative feedback loops around each op amp.

Now, negative feedback is simply a fancy name for taking some of the output of a device, inverting the polarity of the signal, and feeding it back into the input of the device. Moderate amounts of negative feedback ain't bad, but massive amounts fuck up the slew rate and can smear the transients and their rise time - a very bad thing.

So, why do some manufacturers do it? Cuz if you don't show "rise time" or "slew rate" for the product, you can use cheaper op amps, and still make all the "other specs" look great.

 

[Harvey Gerst]

Harvey

I've been thinking, since an omni doesn't suffer from proximity it might be much better to put a SDC omni close to the upright, you may have a little more bleed but no proximity at very close range.

I'v been experimenting with lots of mics on the upright and actually one's never done searching for that ultimate bass tone with lots of wood and as little bleed as possible. I've found out that an ECM8000 wrapped in foam under the tailpiece can sound even better than a Neumann M149 close to the bass in uni.

What are your thoughts about recording the upright, together with the band in the same room?

Surprise, surprise!! I found the exact same thing you did while recording an upright bass in a Bluegrass group, all playing live in the same room.

I wound up using an ECM8000, right next to the neck joint, skimming the body, aimed at the carpeted floor. The bass player said it was the most accurate recording of his bass that he ever heard, and the bleed from the other instruments was surprisingly minimal and controllable.

 

[Harvey Gerst]

Wow, really enjoyed listening to the tracks. The second one, I played at church for a long time. I lead worship some. The only thing I can say I might have done drastically different is to midi the keys thru my computer and use a more realistic horn sound.

Jemal, the keyboardist, wanted to use his own keyboard and patches. And they had some time constraints.

I would also like to see picks of how you set those dividers up. I am moving my studio to my house and am redoing an attached apartment to accommodate. Thanks again.

I'll try to take some pics showing the positioning of the dividers in the next few days.

 

[kojdogg]

Ok, this is a two part answer to the above paragraphs.

As much as I love and respect my friend Scott Dorsey, the "Schoeps/Dorsey circuit design" isn't a cure all for every mic that comes outta China. Some of their transformer-equipped mics are very good, and some are horrid. There's a whole bunch more to it than transformer vs. no transformer.

Negative feedback, in small doses, can be fine and reduce distortion dramatically. But some op amps require massive amounts of negative feedback to bring the response and distortion into tolerable limits for audio work. And some circuits which use multiple op amps use multiple negative feedback loops around each op amp.

Now, negative feedback is simply a fancy name for taking some of the output of a device, inverting the polarity of the signal, and feeding it back into the input of the device. Moderate amounts of negative feedback ain't bad, but massive amounts fuck up the slew rate and can smear the transients and their rise time - a very bad thing.

So, why do some manufacturers do it? Cuz if you don't show "rise time" or "slew rate" for the product, you can use cheaper op amps, and still make all the "other specs" look great.

Yeah I've read some opinions that Dorsey-modding some mics will raise their noise specs to unacceptable levels.
I definitely agree with what you're saying (typing).
Not trying to pick a fight about this incidentally at all-- just trying to deepen the level of detail of this discussion.
It's always best to be an educated consumer, particularly for any newbies around-- it's not just that you can get by with any "inexpensive stuff," you need the right inexpensive stuff.

 

[timthetortoise]

Just wanted to contribute to this thread. I've been recording on inexpensive gear for the past 4 or so years, and am really glad I started with it instead of paying an assload for something that's probably unnecessary.

My setup is:
Delta 1010
Soundcraft Spirit E12
Two SM57s
An SM57 knockoff
Three Sennheiser E604s
Two Samson CO2s
AKG D112
and last (and probably least)
Audio-Technica AT3035

None of these mics cost more than $300 and none of the other gear (aside from my PC) cost more than $700. I mix on a terrible stereo that I hope to replace with decent monitors someday. I have recorded a lot of bands who come into my untreated storage unit and look a little disappointed, then hear what I'm turning the mixes into and get extremely excited because they're being charged so little and getting at or above the quality of people who are charging around 10x as much (literally). Anyway, great thread. If you want to hear a product of my cheap gear, check http://www.myspace.com/1000talons and listen to the Oceans demo. This is a demo from our new record and was recorded in a day, mixed in about 10 hours. Snare is too high and there are a few other things that need to be changed, but I'd say that with the gear I'm working with and an all-metal/concrete room, it's not too bad.

 

[groovyisland]

-- just trying to deepen the level of detail of this discussion.
It's always best to be an educated consumer...

absolutely right and the negative feedback discussion is very enlightening

from my understanding its easy enough to make an opamp with wide flat frequency response and low noise

the overall circuit and the component types and values tend to emphasize different frequencies or lend a different timbre or quality to the output

mixing and matching the various components is where the good bad and ugly come out

 

[JuliánFernández]

Harvey, check your PM please. Thanks.

 

[Harvey Gerst]

absolutely right and the negative feedback discussion is very enlightening.

from my understanding its easy enough to make an opamp with wide flat frequency response and low noise.

Well, yes and no. Opamps have very wide frequency response, but it's a rising response. To keep it flat, they hafta take some of the output signal (actually, a whole bunch), invert it, and put it back into the input, so that the negative feedback keeps the output linear. It takes a little bit of time for the signal to move through the opamp, so you get a teensy weensy delay; not much, just a little.

But, that delay rolls off a bit of the top end and plays a little havoc with the rise time. No biggie, since the op amp is good out to the megahertz range BUT, we ain't talking about one opamp here; we're talking about several opamps in one circuit, with negative feedback around each one and maybe negative feedback around all of them - from the output of the last opamp, back to the input of the first opamp.

In theory, it should all work fine, but theory ain't what it useta be. Not when you're dealing with young designers, fresh outta school, or mega-companies, looking to save a couple of cents on each piece. Huge amounts of negative feedback can dramatically reduce noise, THD, and IM distortion, but all those negative feedback circuits gave rise to a new distortion, TIM (which stands for Transient Inter-Modulation Distortion).

Hope this clears up some of the confusion.

 

[groovyisland]

ive had large/small condensers of various brands and types

the only 2 i didnt like were the behringer ecm8000 or whatever the designation is for the small onmi "measurement" mic

its a copy of the audix and i was very disappointed with the sound quality

maybe i got a bad one

the other condenser i disliked was the rode nt1 (i believe) which i got soon after they became available

i liked it until i compared the sounds from my various mics and it sounded boxy to me

and yes i had decent preamps. i had a mackie board with the vlz's and i have a rane with the burr-brown chip

i read long ago that burr-brown had gone kaput and there would be no more chips and i was glad at the time that i had gotten mine

 

[Harvey Gerst]

ive had large/small condensers of various brands and types. the only 2 i didn't like were the behringer ecm8000 or whatever the designation is for the small omni "measurement" mic. its a copy of the audix and i was very disappointed with the sound quality. maybe i got a bad one.

the other condenser i disliked was the rode nt1 (i believe) which i got soon after they became available. i liked it until i compared the sounds from my various mics and it sounded boxy to me.

Sounds like you got a bad ECM8000; I know they made some that weren't very good. The 7 I have all work fine.

I didn't like the NT1 when it came out; sounded like the MXL2001, which has a screechy top end to my ear.

 

[groovyisland]

Hope this clears up some of the confusion.

LOLOLOL

wow. i feel like im in college. seriously

so we have good distortion and bad distortion

tim is bad distortion

whoever tim is...

oh yes tim is transient inter-modulation distortion

transient (passing away in time?) modulation is movement...

i would guess that transient just means very brief time divisions here and inter-modulation could be electro-mechanical wave relationships

its enough to blow your mind...

i know which kind of distortion i like... good ol harmonic distortion

 

[Han]

I have only one ECM8000, bought out of curiosity, it's pretty noisy but it sounds pretty good.

I also own a pair of vintage AKC C451/CK1's and I work with a pair of Neumann KM184's of a friend of mine.

Besides that I have four Samson CO2's, bought them because of some raving on the forums. Well, these sound pretty nice, but the C451's sound smoother in the highs and the KM184's are superior sounding.

There really is a significant difference, but the question is: will you hear it back in a dense mix that has been squashed in mastering because of 'we want it louder'?

 

[Harvey Gerst]

LOLOLOL

wow. i feel like im in college. seriously

so we have good distortion and bad distortion

tim is bad distortion

i know which kind of distortion i like... good ol harmonic distortion

Depends on the kind of harmonic distortion. Even order harmonic distortion makes everything sound bigger and fatter; odd order harmonic distortion makes everything sound thinner and shriller. Even order harmonics are simply octaves; they're in tune with the original note.

Odd order harmonics are not in tune with anything, because we use a tempered scale so that a major 3rd or a 5th is not a perfect multiple and sounds in tune. But, odd order distortion is a perfect 3rd and 5th, so it clashes with the rest of the notes in a major chord.

Some types of phase distortion (from multiple speakers, for example) can sound good or bad, depending on their setup.

Any kind of IM distortion is always bad; two notes being played at the same time interact and cause a third non-related note to be generated. TIM is harder to spot than IM because it only happens on notes with a fast rise time. It won't show up on sinewave sweeps.

 

[groovyisland]

harvey you continue to delight and amaze

i know some of what you're talking about but you have a way of tying it all together and making it clear

 

[groovyisland]

the old saying is that vacuum tubes always emphasize the even harmonics, especially the 2nd harmonic (the octave?) and transistors tend to emphasize the odd harmonics

 

[mshilarious]

the old saying is that vacuum tubes always emphasize the even harmonics, especially the 2nd harmonic (the octave?) and transistors tend to emphasize the odd harmonics

Transistors seem to come with a given amount of 2nd harmonic/3rd order distortion. Tubes like to serve up a fatter portion of 1st harmonic/2nd order.

As you might see, there is confusion in nomenclature amongst musicians and engineers. This is because in engineering, "first order" is (usually) in reference to the fundamental, thus "second order" is 2x the fundamental frequency, etc. This corresponds to what a musician understands as the first harmonic, the octave.

The other day I read what was to me a fairly humorous paper written by a seemingly accomplished engineer arguing that everything other people wrote about tubes was wrong, they enhanced odd-order harmonics more than even-order, and that odd-order were the good sounding ones If you want everything to sound like an oboe, I guess But it seems to be the numbering scheme is a continual source of confusion.

Back to transistors, beyond having more odd-order distortion, they will have more high-order distortion, to which the ear is very sensitive even at small amplitudes. This is especially true when driven to clipping, whereas tubes tend to handle that behavior somewhat more gracefully. To me, that is more problematic that low, odd-order distortion, which doesn't particularly bother me. But then I listen to some very dissonant music, and at the same time I don't find equal temperament to be particularly in tune.