Some ideas please for fiddle and guitar home recording project ?

[rabtheranter]

Hi – I play fiddle, and I’m new to recording. I’m doing a distance home recording project for fun with a guitarist 400 miles away. He’s put down a bunch of good guitar tracks using Cubase to some very rough ‘first take’ fiddle tracks, and now it’s down to me to record some better quality 'dry' fiddle tracks. I have Cubase, an average PC, some mics, a couple of pairs of average headphones and a Zoom H4n compact recorder with built in mics. I’d appreciate some help with the following, and anything else you guys might suggest. The final object is to produce something that sounds acceptable on the typical very average playback systems people have in real life, rather than top line audiophile gear.

1) Should I use the Zoom as an audio interface to record with my laptop and Cubase, or would it be easier and more reliable all round to just load his .wav files onto a memory card, load that into the Zoom, then monitor guitar tracks from, and record the fiddle parts to, the same card?

2) For the moment, my only concern is getting a good unprocessed fiddle sound down (we might mix it at a mixdown studio if the music turns out good enough). To judge the quality of the basic sound, would I be better a) just using better headphones b) getting some used budget monitors (say Yamaha MSP5’s or similar) and using those and my current headphones, or c) just using monitor speakers? The listening room would be a 12’ x 8’ bedroom/office with a desktop speaker setup.

3) To judge the quality of the basic recorded sound (I plan to try different house rooms and setups till I find a good one), does it make a difference whether I listen to the ‘dry’ track in stereo or mono?

3) Would I be better to work with both sounds panned dead centre, rather than placed to suit a visual image of two players? How would an acoustic duo usually be placed spatially?

Thanks, Max

 

[gecko zzed]

Try recording straight to the Zoom and try using it as an interface and see which method you like the best.

What microphones do you have?

The room you are using is small, and the danger is that you will get a boxy sound.

Have you got a bigger room anywhere else in the house?

When tracking, use the headphones. When playing back, it is better to use speakers . . . but that only applies if the speakers are half-way reasonable (which usually means spending a lot of money). Computer speakers are generally not good enough for evaluating a mix.

I prefer to listen to the mix in stereo to get an idea of the placement of instruments. I'd but guitar and violin on opposite sides of centre, but close to centre.

 

[rabtheranter]

Thanks gecko zzed: Mics I have are: the built in stereo pair on the Zoom, plus mostly budget gigging mics: three Beyer TG-X58, three AKG D89S, one AudioTechnica ATM-41, two Crown GLM-100s, and an old Shure Prologue 16L condenser.

I can record in a number of rooms including a soft furnished and curtained lounge room about 18' x 18' x 7'H, a glass and tiled conservatory 18' x 12' x 12'H with a very live sound, a hard surfaced kitchen 12' x 10' x 7'/11' H sloping ceiling, and an outside drywall lined wooden shed/office 18' x 10' x 7'/9' H pitched ceiling. In practise, I could listen in the small office I mentioned, or the conservatory, or the outside wooden shed/office - setting up the lounge room with a listening desk might cause some domestic disharmony .