Gear suggestions for the big opera voice

C

Cmcaskill

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I am a Wagnerian soprano and would love to do some streaming and home recording. Space is decent, not great but there are some open places for the voice to bounce around. Problem is I have no idea how to mic a huge voice — I know the mic has to be far away and I will need an audio interface (I have a UA Apollo solo, I hope that’s a good choice). I also am likely to be recording in churches or other medium spaces, wherever I can find— and

Can I get something that will work for operatic overtones and seriously huge voice in the $500 - $1000 range?

Total novice at this stuff, but I need to learn fast. I don’t really need editing tools at the moment (people usually prefer totally unaltered sound for things like audition prescreening).

thanks,

—CM
 
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I thought we did this, but I can't find it - so, here we go.

There are two aspects here and oddly, volume is not really one of them. It's the space. Sound bouncing around is usually destructive if it's ordinary home sized rooms. We think that churches always sound good, but they don't. I do quite a lot of opera style recordings and I've got a smallish list of big and small churches that work for recording. Saxon and Norman churches tend to be good as a general thing - but some of the smaller churches cross some kind of line and sound pretty poor. I've not isolated the reason. I suspect but can't prove that it's the ones where ceilings have been replaced during renovations and they've added insulation and modern materials - and added soft cushions and things to the pews? One locally that I often have to visit has really boring and unexciting acoustics.

You have choices to make. The room at home could be deadened even more and then a live acoustic added electronically, or you record in a nice venue. Other considerations are the accompaniment - a real piano, or even organ and a voice sound nice - but need a person with good ears to record you. You cannot do this yourself because you probably don't have the time to record, listen, move equipment, record, listen, move again over and over. Church pianos can be dire and record terribly. Some singers can adapt to technology. I worked with a Soprano who had a very decent pianist to accompany her, who was covid stuck in Boston USA, and her recordings of her piano were pretty awful, so in the end, she recorded into cubase and sent me the file which I then used to create a track - complete with on one piece a click as piano and voice started at bar 1. My singer then wore in-ears in the church and adapted to them really quickly. So we had a singer in a nice space and a piano played in America but edited in the UK?

If you have a space at home, then I'd suggest recording yourself on an iPhone then listening very critically - NOT - to you voice but what your voice sounds like in the space. Use good quality headphones and close your eyes and see how 'big' your brain says the space is. It will tell you it's not a church, but is it a big room, or a room with soft furnishing, or a small empty room? All these things should be evident from a phone recording.

When you have the space sorted - that is when to move onto microphones. Mouth to mic distance changes the mic to wall ratio. So closer in produces less room content. There is no reason why the mic cannot be close in - subject to the mic being able to cope with the SPL. -10 or -20dB pads can be found on many mics, not just expensive ones, and some dynamics don't need them anyway. My usual advice now is never to buy an expensive one first. I think that I'd consider a Shure SM57, not really a vocal microphone but a very forgiving dynamic. They can have a number of windshields that will remove pops and blasts and a bit of sibilance. Experiment with this, and find the best sounding distance for your voice, which might change depending on the piece. I did some Strauss that was excessively sibilant. The German words seem to contain so many ssss noises so I had to readjust the position which of course changed the room (a church in this example) sound. Too much room by going a little further back, but then a height increase and tilt down reduced reflections. It can be silly things like that. Once you have got used to how your voice sounds, you can consider mic 2 - one that will help the little things you won't be happy with - maybe you need a little more top, or less chest resonance - then you pick something complimentary. If you are going to record the real piano, then a couple of small condensers can be useful here.

Tell us a bit more about your application and especially your room.
 
So, a test recording with the phone about 6-7 ft away turned out ok, at least to my inexpert ears.

Space: 15x15 vaulted room, with me singing from the regular-ceiling side of it. Beyond that (on the axis of my voice) things split into L and R with more normal ceiling height, and at the end is an entry space with a two-story ceiling. Total length is maybe 56-60’ with a bunch of weird places for things to bounce around. I’m not /quite/ in line with a space open all the way to the front door, I’m more singing into the kitchen, but maybe the access to that long space makes a difference. In the picture I would be standing between the red and green chairs. I’ll post more if it would help… Maybe when my house looks less like a disaster zone.

When I’m in better voice I’ll do another test sample & post a link. I think I will also record some samples from different spots and different directions, then listen on the good headphones (I’ve got some open Beyers I use to listen to opera at home.)

Use: What I’m likely to do from home (and this is NOT ideal) would be to have my pianist record, send me the track, then pop that sound in my ears as inaudibly as possible (IEMs? Open headphones? Closed?) Then I’d record myself singing along, hopefully without capturing any piano audio. So, similar to your cross-ocean setup I guess.

Questions:
1 - do you have any idea if it would be feasible to stream from this setup? Are there audio tools that would help correct for latency issues between the tracks, in real time? I know there’s at least 1 web platform trying to do this for live collaboration (maybe aimed more at rehearsals or recording than live-streaming), but my coach and I never tried it.

2 - I picked up a Sennheiser MK4 on the advice of a friend, should I send it back?

3 - If it looks like streaming is going to be a possibility, would it make sense to just start with the Shure SM7B since it’s a go-to for speaking? Or would it be a bad choice for the dynamic and frequency range I need?

3 - If it looks like streaming is going to be a possibility, would it make sense to just start with the Shure SM7B since it’s a go-to for speaking? Or would it be a bad choice for the dynamic and frequency range I need?

4 - Is there a YouTube person or other online course you’d recommend to learn about this stuff? For someone who knows basic physics

I have about 6 mic suggestions from scouring through websites and forums - looking at the Rode NT1 on the low end up to $1000 on the high end. Most are cardioid or supercardioid condensers. One is a ribbon, but one of the comments in a recording forum mentioned that for bigger voices they aren’t such a good idea. Plus I tend to be hard on equipment and they’re super delicate, right?

I am a bit overwhelmed - I really, really appreciate your advice!

thanks,

—Cari M
 

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Are you thinking about streaming just audio or video too?

Latency isn't a problem because if it were me, I'd probably use the software I'm familiar with then feed it to whatever you fancy to stream it. So I'd have the track in the computer - route it to my ears - via IEMs or closed back headphones, and then mix the live mic with the prerecorded piano and balance it in Cubase (for me) I could also then use reverb plugins to sweeten it up and do the EQ too. The streaming software introduces latency - you just don't listen to that, just what goes into it.

The ribbon comments are sort of correct - they are more fragile, but they're not made out of porcelain, and crack with a small knock. The worry people have is that a string breath could blow out the correlations in the ribbon, but most ribbons are well protected. The most famous ribbon mic currently in use all over the world is what commentators scream into in sports - The old STC, now Coles mic. Used right on the lips, and yelled into during stressful moments - they seem bomb proof. I think I still have a couple somewhere. Dreadful sounding mics for anything else, but damn good for their primary job.

You have a big voice, but you won't have the mic near your mouth - so don't get hung up on your voice. One drawback or advantage of them is that they are bi-directional, so they pick up the space. This is a loud soprano - she has an AKG414 set to cardioid and a ribbon - the ribbon sounded nicer. It was shot for video too - so some mics were not even in the list - SM7B for example - you'd use that very close in, so the video would not have worked. The distance from her mouth in this small church was ideal. I used multiple mics so I could pick later which was best.107584796_10213947685724590_249396409993518780_n.jpg
 
I was thinking video for everything, obviously with me hopping back and forth between different ‘scenes’ for singing vs sitting & talking. Would I end up out of sync with video when singing because of the extra process involved?

ribbon questions: passive or active? Near field or far field? I stumbled onto a sample of a younger Wagnerian soprano on a Sandhill ribbon and it sounds pretty good, totally transparent (granted, I’m sure she was in a good space and the 6011 in question is about $1500 over my budget!)



Interesting how close she is to the mic. Her instrument is a shade lighter than mine and has a little more metallic edge on it.
It seems like whenever people try to record me close to a microphone, I end up with an overexposed, too-present sound that sounds horrible to me. At least, compared with recital recordings where there are one or more mics set some distance away and the voice has a chance to bounce around some. And with things like prescreening materials for auditions, you’re of course not allowed to edit anything, so it’s verboten to add room reverb or any other effects.

I had been considering a Royer before, and then my web-scouring also led me to the AEA R84, which is near the upper end for what I would want to spend. And it also turns out Sandhill makes a slightly less expensive ribbon, too (by which I mean more money than I OUGHT to spend, but this is my life and the voice won’t be here forever, so…)

Here are the ribbon candidates:
AEA R84 or R88 (not sure why I would want a stereo ribbon here, would love to hear your opinion)
Sandhill 6019A (rather over what I’d like to spend, but yolo)
Royer R-10

And here are the cardioids that came up:
Beyer M88
Neumann KMS105
Rode NT 1, NT 1A (super economical)
Shure SM7B

Lmk any thoughts. I’ll be doing a coaching in my pianist’s space next week, so at some point in the next couple of weeks I’ll have samples from both spaces. It’d be great to have a solution for recording/streaming at his place — we’ve done audition recordings there, but with the above mentioned foregrounding issue, I wasn’t crazy about any of them. I mean, I hate listening to recordings of myself more than anything, but at least recital and performance recordings don’t make me want to stab myself in the leg with a fork. :)

Meanwhile, looking around for possible spaces to rent… and learning how the software end works.

And if there are any tutorials you’d recommend for learning about this stuff, please let me know. The extent of my experience has been cutting ends off things in Audacity and playing with Max/MSP …around 12 years ago maybe.

At the software end I’ll probably be using Luna (comes with the Apollo) or Ableton Live.

thanks so much for the help! Let me know if I should send you a check. Or cookies. :)
 
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It is totally down to your ears, your voice and the space. A combination that works in terms of balance is where you start. Close miking changes the timbre and removes the room component as it gets closer. If video is involved I’d never even consider a huge ugly mic. All the mics you list would work once you find the magic position. What you get are tonal shifts. To a large degree these can be tweaked to taste. The mic is in acoustic spaces secondary to placement. I smiled a bit about the idea of artificial reverb being out. If it’s done properly nobody should be able to tell but people make huge mistakes with reverb. A perfect but slightly dry recording is always tweaked with eq, reverb and even invisible editing. The notion people don’t do this is funny. They do but they do it so the audio sounds like what you see. I’d never record close perspective opera of the er, louder, variety. The p’s and b’s can be impossible to deal with. If your piano is recorded with an audio perspective your vocal must sound like it’s in the same room. Otherwise you sound like Hailey Westenra doing pop. I suspect I’d not put a mic closer than 600mm probably a metre from a Wagnerian soprano. Look at the microphones you see in shot on famous singer’s of your style. Always discrete and small. I hate big mics on videos. Don’t buy and mics till you’ve experimented with cheaper ones and trained your ears.
 
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