Recording - February 2011 - 45

line, then on another track, play the harmony line, etc. We decided to start with the lowest notes as the first line, then work our way up from there. (She also informed me that doubling the viola and violin parts would, in all likelihood, be too difficult, so we dropped that option as well.) The recording progressed without a hitch. Most lines were played from start to finish with no mistakes. As we moved “up” a line to the next harmony, I would change the mic position by a couple feet in an arc around the cello (still using headphones and listening for a sweet spot). The final mic position was just over 17 feet away to capture the fundamental frequencies of the lowest notes. There was, unavoidably, more room sound on this track, but the portable “gobo” kept the sound much tighter than I had anticipated! Once the primary tracks were complete we did a short section of staccatos (short, separated notes). We did

on a fretless instrument like the cello, and more easily if the player isn’t from the symphony. I threw my pitch correction onto all the tracks using the “Instrument” setting and all those little imperfections disappeared into glorious harmony! When comparing the cellos to the sampled strings I found a difference in tone. Using the eq principle of “cut, not boost”, I placed a parametric eq on the cello tracks (which were all routed to a single bus) with a ridiculously deep cut and slowly changed the frequency, sweeping low to high while listening carefully to the cellos. I stopped around 1000 Hz when the tone of the cellos more closely matched the samples and backed off the cut from “ridiculous” to “reasonable”. (What—you don’t have those settings on your mixer? They are right next to the “suck” fader, which should always be all the way down!) The staccatos I handled differently. They needed to stand out against some

I would change the mic position by a couple of feet in an arc around the cello, still using headphones and listening for a sweet spot.
use double stops on this recording wherever one note of the double was an open string. We stacked up a few tracks of these to use as color during the instrumental section of the song. I handed Natalie a check for her first recording session with the satisfaction that I now had some real strings to work with! heavy instrumentation so I didn’t want their low end muddying up the mix. I placed a highpass filter at 400 Hz, panned for stereo, and then pushed up the volume until I could distinguish all the attacks of the bow against the strings. I routed the staccatos in with the rest of the cellos so they received the 1000 Hz dip in eq as well.

Mixing I had the cellist play the opening and ending with as big a vibrato as possible, with a mind to featuring it in the mix—a big and varying vibrato would signal the listener that, “hey, those are real strings!” I had several tracks with the opening line, but I chose to mute all but one close-miked track, along with the 17-foot distant mic for the low end. Nice sound! If you don’t have any pitch correction software, I suggest you get some for a project like this. The slightest variation in pitch from one track to the next can create a chorus-like effect (or something worse). This easily happens

I routed the cello bus into another that already contained the sampled strings, and that combined bus into a single stereo Aux. From there I applied some light compression and reverb to glue together the real and the sampled into a (hopefully) unified whole. Was it a success? Check out the audio (and video) samples at www.gracenote.ca/RealStrings and listen for yourself! D. Bruce Moore (moore@recordingmag .com) is a recording engineer and producer in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Learn more about his work at www.gracenote.ca.
RECORDING FEBRUARY 2011

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Recording - February 2011

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