micing a big band.

[andydeedpoll]

hull there

in a couple of weeks, i plan on doing a little demo of my big band. it's five saxes, four trombones, four trumpets, bass guitar, electric guitar, keys drums and auxiliary percussion. just stuff from a rehearsal, nothing too fancy. i just thought i'd run my plan by you, to see what you think... my real limitation is the fact i've only got 6 inputs on my sound card, though i can mix more than one mic to one channel.

here's what i was thinking.

two studio projects B1's to cover the horns - i was thinking either directly above the saxes, facing towards the trumpets, to get a spread of the whole section across the stereo image, or one in front, mainly to cover the saxes and get a bit of the 'bones, and the other placed to pick up mainly the trumpets with a bit of the bones, to get more of a saxes-trombones-trumpet thing going once they're panned. any thoughts on that one? i was thinking the first one is more likely, as the second could sound unbalanced.

fairly minimal with the drums - overhead in the form of an SE1a condensor and a bass drum mic, and possibly snare, all mixed down on to one input. i would probably also put the auxiliary percussion onto this channel too.

i was planning on putting the bass guitar, guitar and keys onto two tracks, again as a stereo image, with the bass dead center, and the keys and guitar either side. again, not too sure about this one.

i'd use my last channel as a 'solo' mic - for ocassional vocals, and any solos that are played on any of the wind instruments. this'll probably be an SM58 or some other dynamic mic.

i'm expecting a fair amount of bleed, and the room won't sound that great, but these things are kind of out of my control - like i said, i'm basically recording a rehearsal here.

any thoughts or suggestions?

ta

Andy

 

[gecko zzed]

I've recorded a couple of big bands, comparable in size. I had the choice of going 'big' or 'small' the first time I did this. Because of time and technology constraints, I settled on 'small'.

I just used two LDCs, placed as close to the bandleader as I could, a couple of feet above his head, in a rough x-y shape. This worked a treat, and the listener gets to hear (roughly) what the bandleader does.

On other occasions I have added a pair of SDCs to supplement the LCDs, same height, but spaced wide. This works as well. I expect that there are better placement techniques, but these work ok for me.

I didn't worry too much that the kit was off-centre. It was reasonably balanced by timps and other percussion on the other side.

 

[andydeedpoll]

ah cool, that sounds like it might be useful, except for the fact that our rehearsal room sounds dreadful - i was hoping that using a number of closer mics might help illiminate some of the crappy boominess and things to it.

any other thoughts?

Andy.