Recording - February 2011 - 28

Al Schmitt is a household name in audio, a winner of fifteen Grammys and untold other awards, who has done it all, from Duane Eddy and Sam Cooke to Diana Krall and Natalie Cole, from Henry Mancini to Willie Nelson... I approached him last November at the AES convention in San Francisco and he graciously answered my many questions.

Do you have a favorite music style to work with? Al Schmitt: I do all types of records, Rock & Roll, Jazz, and everything else. My favorite thing is to record 40–80 piece orchestras. What do you do to separate the piano mics from the vocal mic for an artist like Diana Krall or Dr. John, who sings and plays? When I worked at Capitol I had a sleeve built that slips over the piano—the lid of the piano goes up and the sleeve goes over that, then I put the piano mics in two holes in the sleeve so I can keep the vocal out of the piano, and the piano out of the vocal—not 100% but quite a lot. What is your microphone setup on a grand piano? I use Neumann M149s on the grand piano and most of the time the mics will be up over the hammers about 16 inches, one over the bass and one over the treble. Most of the time they’ll be in cardioid, but sometimes I’ll put them in omni.
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RECORDING FEBRUARY 2011

When you use the mics in omni, will you bring them closer to hammers? No, I’ll leave them where they were. I feel like not enough people use omni microphones and they should. I know, I use them all the time on brass. I like the way the microphones sound better in omni than in cardioid. Will you use one omni microphone for the whole brass section? No, it’ll be two, and if it’s trombones and trumpets in the brass section I’ll have anywhere from 2–4 microphones on the trombones and the same on the trumpets. Then I’ll have a room microphone out maybe 15 feet in front of them. What is your microphone setup for an 80-piece orchestra? It’s a lot easier than you think, because you just mic sections. It’s a lot easier to do something with 50 or 60 pieces than it is to do something with 8 or 10 pieces. You mike the violins, the violas, the cellos, the bassist, and then you have a Decca Tree put

up. A Decca Tree is comprised of 3 room mics: one to the left, one to the center, and one to the right, and you put those up over the conductor. In some cases that’s all you need if the conductor of the orchestra has a good balance in the room and you have the Decca Tree up over his head. You might need a couple spot mics for the solos, but that’s it. What is your favorite room to record an 80-piece orchestra in? My favorite room in California would probably be the Sony scoring stage and then second would be 20th Century Fox, then in Europe of course there is Abbey Road and AIR. How different do you think Henry Mancini’s recordings would sound if they were recorded today? I still record the same way as I did back then. I still use a lot of the same microphones and my setups are pretty much the same, so if I were recording them they would probably sound about the same. The fact is that you have Pro Tools now and you have

Recording - February 2011

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