During lockdown, I created various remote projects for the choirs and orchestras I keep recording - singers and musicians recording themselves at home - and one thing was very clear. an iPhone mic is very capable and the room is the absolute arbiter of success. One made me smile - two violins, a viola, cello and double bass. The band leader recorded in his home space - a bedroom it looked like - with heavy velvet curtains drawn, his wardrobe visible with open doors and more clothes hanging from the picture rail all around the space I could see. There wasn't any bare wall visible . His note said - please use the dark towel behind me when you crop - please don't let them see the mess. I'll leave you to add what reverb you think it needs. The other musicians supplied theirs. One in her kitchen, another in the bathroom because the tiles "make it sound nice" (it didn't) and the others in bare walled rooms. Worst was the double bass that made something in the room rattle on certain notes. I passed them to the leader and his solution? He recorded all the other parts on violin and cello (he didn't have a viola) and I recorded the double bass with me playing it - not used a bow for over 20 years! We both agreed not to tell the others - so in the video, we see them, but hear us five dead tracks, so a nice reverb that is the same on everyone worked really well. The original were played beautifully in rotten rooms.
Violins rely on the space more than the others, and I agree that mic choice is less critical on them as EQ can usually save the day, even with cheaper mics.
Indeed Rob. As I mentioned the room is the single biggest tone generator, other than the player, in the recording signal path. The trick however at least for us mere mortals with mortal budgets is to first identify then address problematic sonic issues without breaking the bank or wrecking the aesthetics of the environment. That often takes time, trial and error, some degree of compromise, and a boat-load of research to get a room to its best.
It is however important to note that a good-sounding room is just that and may indeed need no attention at all. There are plenty of magical rooms that just serendipitously work. James Taylor, Sting and Bruce Springsteen all purchased real estate based at least in part on sonics.
On the other hand, the old wives-tale about purchasable sound treatment kits is simple fools folly. All the major audio retailers were pushing that concept hard a few years back. It just doesn't work that way. There is no singular sonic problem that can be addressed with a singular purchased product and to make matters worse a lot of that product simply didn't do anything by way of making things sound better. They were, by and large, placebos.
The most universal problem is of course the noise floor or the room itself. This dictates how far away mic placement can be from the source. For me, condensers on acoustic instruments sound far more natural when mic'd from a bit of distance. If the room's noise floor forces a
close mic technique then it almost always is overly apparent in the recording. It's not a horrible sound but it's not a great sound either. This is especially egregious with acoustic guitars because of their ridiculously wide frequency responses. Too close and proximity traits create an unusable, boomy mess.
In the end, there are solutions even in the home recording environments if one is inclined to do the grunt work of research. One super easy remedy for noise floor (albeit a bit costly) is iZotope's Spectral De-Noise plug-in which has become one of, if not the most used plug-in for the motion picture and television industry as a means of controlling noise on location sets where noise is often a given. It's wonderfully effective on instrument recording as well. My two cents of course but, give me a good room and whatever decent mic you might have and I'll make that work better than the $6000.00 Neumann in an awful room and do that consistently.
). So I want to get the characteristics of the instrument.
