Recording - August 2018 - 63

Live
RECORDING
to the trickiest
ever get !
RECORDING THE ROOM

MONITORING

Go to a rehearsal and set up the microphone on a tall
stand. If you don't have a tall stand, look at getting a light-duty
stand that will go up at least thirty feet. It's common for people
to use Manfrotto lighting stands with microphone adaptors on
them-they're inexpensive, easy to carry, and go up high.
See Figure 2. You'll want a stereo bar to mount the two mics in
the correct configuration. Cheap ones work fine, fancy ones
look better to the customer.
Wander around the room, listening with a finger in one ear
Using only one ear, you get a sense of how the mic will sound,
without your brain trying to do the sort of compensation that it
normally does. Find a place where you get a good balance
between the room sound and the orchestra, so the band is not
too distant or too close. Go to that place and put the microphone stand there, cranking it up around ten or fifteen feet, then
go back and listen to the miked sound. Is there a good balance
between the room and the band, or is it too echoey or too dry?
Avoid being at the exact center of the hall, especially on rooms
with arched ceilings, because you're apt to find some sort of flutter
echo there. It'll be fine if you move away by even a couple of feet.
Once you're at this point, you can start thinking about
orchestral balances. If you move the whole stand to the right,
you can get higher levels on the instruments on the right. If you
raise the stand, you can get higher levels on the instruments
in the rear, and if you lower it you will get higher levels on
the instruments at the front of the orchestra. Balance the horns
and the strings by raising and lowering the mics, balance the
fiddles with the basses by moving the stand side to side.
If there is a soloist, you'll want the soloist to be a little louder.
You can move the mic pair to be closer to the soloist, for example
moving it very far to one side of the hall so the soloist is in
front, and then turning the mic pair to get the whole orchestra
centered. If this is a studio-type recording and not a concert, you
can often get the conductor to move the soloist closer to the mics
while making sure that the soloist can hear the orchestra and see
the conductor. Sight lines are very important, more so than they
are in groups that don't have a central conductor.

If at all possible, get a pair of speakers set up in a quiet
place backstage or nearby, and don't try and monitor on
headphones. The problem here is that since you're building
the mix in the room with two mics, you can't go back and
fix things after the fact. You have to get it right the first time,
and you have to have monitoring good enough that you
can tell what is going on. The speakers don't need to be
tonally perfect: you can live with more restricted low end
than you're used to for recording rock music. But they need
to give you a good sense of distances and how far away
things sound in the mix. Good imaging is a plus, too.
There is nothing more frustrating than getting back and
discovering things on your studio monitors that you didn't
hear in the field. These might be things like instruments that
fall off the edge of the soundfield on the distant right or left,
but they might be things like chairs squeaking (or the
absolute worst: the conductor's podium squeaking).

JUST ADD REVERB?
If you're recording a live concert, there will be an
audience. The first thing you need to know is that the room
will be slightly more dead when the audience files in. The
second thing is that the audience will make noise. The era
of everyone's watch beeping on the hour in the middle of
the concert is gone, thankfully, but there will be coughs and
children squealing and all kinds of noise.
You may be willing to accept these in your recording,
just because it's part of making an accurate documentation
of the original performance. You might not be willing to
accept them in the recording, because the conductor or
concertmaster doesn't want them there. Or maybe you are
recording for broadcast, and the broadcaster has warned
you they don't want to hear any of that.
If this is the case, you might want to move the mic pair
much farther forward than you normally would, trying to
keep the same balances but getting a much drier sound with
less room sound (and thus less audience). You can then add

RECORDING August 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2018