Trumpet & Piano

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BarryWilson

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Would anyone recommend a microphone suitable for recording trumpet and piano together? It needs to be a USB mic.
 
It was going well till you said the USB bit - you need a USB mic with gain settings, or attenuators. Recording trumpet and piano together will be a real challenge. You will be doing lots of moving a single mic around. I assume a mono recording is the aim? Ideally you would record with two mics as a minimum - and often 3, using two on the piano, or a stereo pair at more of a distance in a nice sounding space. A typical podcasting mic, connected via USB will be a challenge for blend and balance, although in a nice space, once you find the right place, it will be usable - and maybe you could add some gentle reverb to give it a sense of space with width.

What are you trying to do? The USB bit means compromise, I'm afraid.
 
Thanks for your detailed reply, Rob. My cousin and I play trumpet & piano programs for senior adult groups. I've got a couple of motives:
1. to improve our performances a little by recording ourselves rehearsing. We could do this with my old Zoom H2 digital recorder but...
2. Playing back using the Zoom is cumbersome and I'd prefer to use Audacity on my laptop.
3. I'd like to burn a few tunes to CDs to give to friends and family and the Zoom isn't quite good enough. I know these won't be studio quality...but we're not studio quality either :-)
 
I doubt that the majority of the USB mics available will be any better than what you get from the H2. You say the Zoom isn't good enough for a CD. I would beg to differ. Most of the time, if there are issues, it's a matter of mic placement rather than inherent sound quality problems.

It's very easy to dump the audio from the Zoom to your computer, and then play that via Audacity. I do that with my H4, I NEVER use it for playback except via earphones to hear that I got the recording I wanted. Then it's immediately dumped to computer.
 
So, what I think you're saying is that in order to get a better quality recording I need to upgrade to a higher level mic and a mixer???
 
No - the Zoom can produce stunning quality recordings - I have two different ones. Your problem is simply placement. when you say it's not good enough quality, what exactly do you mean? Jimmy quango uses a zoom (or what looks like a zoom) on hs guitar recordings. His recording quality is really good - his secret, the placement. Your zoom is stereo, so two microphones would be the shopping list - but the zoom and Tascam mics on these small units are surprisingly good. If you don't like that sounds, then your budget needs to be quite high.

If you give us a snippet of a recording you've made that you don't like and has made you want to improve - stick it up and we'll tell you what's wrong very quickly.

It will be wrong place, or wrong recording space, or the placement of piano and trumpet. Or sometimes all of them!

You have a stereo recorder of OK quality. The H2 doesn't have a brilliant spec, but if you stick those files into Audacity, it should be able to give you what you need?
 
I'll experiment with different placements. The space is static because it's a grand piano. Many thanks for taking time to help.
 
Rob, I hooked my Zoom H2 to my laptop and used it to record into Audacity. Then I was able to play back with one mouse clik. Since my computer is connected to my Onkyo amp with Bose speakers...it sounded great! I just recorded the trumpet alone. The next step will be to see how it does with both trumpet and piano.
 
Barry, you have a 4 channel mode on the H2, where you get stereo on both front and back. Unfortunately, you'll probably get significant bleed if you place the recorder over the grand piano and then try to play into the back side channels. Still, it might give you enough separation that you can do some balancing of the sound in a mix. According to the manual, you can't use it as an interface in 4 channel mode, so you need to capture to the SD card. Record to the internal memory and dump the 4 channels down to your computer (as two stereo wav files).
 
I had an original H2. In a small space the echo/bleed made the (4ch) result essentially unusable. I'd guess a big space/stage, outside, or a really dead room might work.
 
That's the one I have, too. I got a pretty good recording the other day in the auditorium of my church. It's a relatively lively room but no echo.
 
To be clear, that original H2 was amazing in stereo, and as noted, placed correctly. I have some recordings using tat t which I still think hold up fine, given I had no clue what I was doing :).

There’s a young guy, Joshua Lee Turner that has don a lot of acoustic recordings (on YT) using just that recorder, solo, duo and even trios.

Plugged into a PC you were limited to 16-bits, unless there was a firmware update. I’d guess the H2n has improved on that.
 
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