Miking a string quartet live

[paulears]

Using an all in one is great but sorting the positioning will take some time withoutproper monitoring!

[Oldradiohand]

Just put the musicians in their normal positions in a slight arc, position the mics in front of the quartet about 6 to 12 ft back and all will be well. You might want to narrow the image a bit for playback through PA 'cos you'll want to have the quartet sounding like it's on the stage (or in the pit), not spread across the whole theatre!

[david.elsbury]

I got the impression that this is live record only, not through a pa? Though the title is slightly misleading ? :)

[Oldradiohand]

Later in the thread Jivemaster explained it was for a dance group performing when there was no live quartet. I'd certainly get a couple of small diaphragm cardioids even if I was doing rock/pop gigs 'cos they're good for drum overheads.

[david.elsbury]

Ah gotcha :) yep sdc's are a good toolbox item

[sam.spoons]

I'd be interested to know if the dance group are amateurs or pros, if they are paying the quartet (who are amateurs or pros?), and if they plan to use the recording for paying gigs or just the odd church hall charity event (or, of course, any combination/permutation of the above). All those factors would affect my advice on whether to do the gig for free (always wiling to do that for a good cause) and/or spend money to achieve the necessary result.

[Shez]

ORTF? nice for ambiance but not as good for location, give me coincident any day. Mind you, I like the sound of coincident STC 4038s in a church!

To each their own :)

I've had more than one looking-over-my-shoulder moment whilst monitoring on headphones as I could have sworn someone was talking there or a door had opened or whatever - the stereo imaging was uncannily realistic. Coincident positioning doesn't give you the time of arrival difference that your ears do. One day when I have four identical decent mics and a bit of time, I'll have to set up both configurations and have a critical comparison.

[paulears]

It always gets presented as simple, with two mics and just four musicians but the number of people who get a successful recording first time out is very low. In practically all cases the setup that will work in a particular room is an aural one and while you may prefer certain techniques you have to modify them. In some spaces you may even need to close mic and simulate the space afterwards. The reason is that when you replay the track in another space you have TWO room sounds combined which sound awful. Hence you may need to record dry or dryer than normal which stereo techniques make difficult. A music track for replay in a live space is different from a typical CD for home listening. I've recorded piano music for danc exams for years now, and normal ambient recording techniques sound rotten replayed in a reflective dance studio. Not quite so bad as a quartet on stage, but a similar issue.

[Jivemaster]

Just half of the question then.

 

is the Tascam recorder (as available from Richer Sounds) a good recorder for the job, assuming the use of a better mic pair?

[sam.spoons]

The DR05 can't handle pro mics, it's input is a stereo mini jack so it has no balanced inputs and no Phantom Power. The DR40 has Balanced inputs with Phantom Power (though they don't specify voltage, many battery powered devices only supply 12V phantom rather than the standard 49V) but is £140.

[revbobuk]

I'd rather have the Zoom, personally. That way you could see whether you liked coincident or ORTF better!

[Cheeseweasel]

Last time I did this I persuaded a local church to let us use their building, using a pair of Schoeps CMC-5 with MK4 (cardioid) capsules, hired from Wigwam for about a tenner a piece IIRC. Lovely sounding mics, arranged as an ORTF pair. I personally prefer the sound of ORTF over a coincident pair, as the time-of-arrival differences give a pleasing spaciousness to the sound, whilst still giving reasonably accurate imaging and mono-compatibility. Personally, as a listener I don't care much about super accurate imaging (I've always thought those that do tend to be the types to have a big armchair positioned in the exact sweet spot between their expensive hifi speakers where they sit and listen to the sound of their CDs instead of just enjoying the music ;), but I do love the sense of involvement that TOA differences bring to music.

 

Be prepared to move the mics around a lot - small changes in positioning do have a large effect on the sound. It's useful to have your control position in the next room with a pair of half-decent speakers for monitoring and getting the mic position right.

[Oldradiohand]

ORTF? nice for ambiance but not as good for location, give me coincident any day. Mind you, I like the sound of coincident STC 4038s in a church!

To each their own :)

I've had more than one looking-over-my-shoulder moment whilst monitoring on headphones as I could have sworn someone was talking there or a door had opened or whatever - the stereo imaging was uncannily realistic. Coincident positioning doesn't give you the time of arrival difference that your ears do. One day when I have four identical decent mics and a bit of time, I'll have to set up both configurations and have a critical comparison.

 

It would sound good on headphones because its a binaural-ish recording technique but I find the additional time of arrival differences tends to confuse the Blumlein amplitude difference imaging when listening on speakers. Spaced or near coincident mics are great for sound effects where you want a diffused ambient sound, though. Oh dear, this is turning into a different thread, isn't it?

[Solstace]

For home/hifi playback, for me it's ORTF every time these days on things like this in good-sounding rooms. Bad-sounding rooms, especially when time is short, simply get the ORTF mic placed higher-and-closer than I'd like for an "ideal" room to minimise capture of the stuff I don't want to hear, often making the room itself mostly inaudible if the mic is close enough. Sometimes I might even use a small foam panel (usually the one from the box the mics came in) somewhere near the mics to screen off the reflections from the area of the room I least want to hear. Yes, the proximity to the source means the imaging is wider than I'd like, but that can be fixed later, if needed. Then I can apply careful amounts of reverb in post - usually based on impulse measurements of rooms I *do* like for the kind of material. If mono-compatibility is an absolute concern in the brief I might go for M/S techniques instead. Taking careful note of the approximate (or even actual) dimensions of the room and number of people present at the time can help with this, so that the reverb applied in post can be tailored to better match what was there on the day.

 

And if the room's *really* bad, I'll go ORTF AND close-mic. I can usually salvage something from the room that way.

 

I simply gave up X/Y coincident pairs long ago - I (and many of my clients) just hate the flat-earth sound I get from them, whatever mics and rooms I've recorded in. It's just too... mono. Push the angles further apart to compensate and you start picking up more crud you don't need, and opening up a hole in the middle. Use hypercardioid mics, and you start picking up stuff from behind. And woe betide you if you have a soloist who then deigns to move during the piece. Imaging collapses as the original positioning (therefore timing, therefore comb-filtering) relationship changes. If you catch it in a rehearsal you pop a spot-mic on them so you can blend it in. You then think you can time-align, except you then realise they're moving in three dimensions and you now have three sources to keep track of, so you adjust the timings again and they move again, and... gaaaaagh...

 

By contrast, I find ORTF gets me the placement cues without the extra work of other techniques. To my ear it seems the distance between the capsules forces the comb filtering to occur at frequencies that are less distracting. I say "to my ear" because while I *could* (and know how) I've not done the math to prove it yet, so I might be looking at the wrong reason for what I'm finding. But practically I find that if my "lead" moves around, the image shifts in a more realistic way, and doesn't mess up the treble as they do so. In practice I get plenty of options to fiddle with imaging in post if I want to, and this combination gets me lots of happy clients. And it even seems to work well in a surprising number of live reinforcement gigs, too. Collapse it down to mono with a simple downmix and I find a simple EQ tweak is often enough to get the balance back on most mixes. So much so that I now have a simple M/S split EQ setup in my mastering software rig to deal with that automatically.

 

MS gets me plenty of technically-correct options to play in post, and results in lots of happy technicians (especially those with backgrounds or dayjobs in broadcast) due to mono-compatibility. Strangely however, by the time the work has been through post, the creatives always end up happier with the pure or post-enhanced ORTF approach even when I've set up the MS processing to mimic (again in post, by going back to the maths and physics) what the ORTF actually would have done on the day. Perhaps something is lacking in my modelling because I'm not able to model the frequency-response differences are of typical cardioid capsules vs Omni vs Fig-8?

 

The Superlux S502 is hitting me as a great way to do ORTF on a budget without making it look like something that came out of Dr Frankenstein's lab. Feed that into a mic-level recorder of choice (I happen to have a few laying around that give phantom) and you're away.

 

Finally, for anything that's going to be played back a reverberant space, close-mice'd multitrack might be a way forward, so you can fix the balance later, either at playback, or at least on mixdown away from the live recording environment.

[Shez]

To continue this slightly OT topic, there's a fantastic article in the November Sound on Sound about the proms and how they handle the sound for that. Teaser here; subscribers can access the whole thing or just buy the magazine or PDF.