[Ty Ford]

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 12:08:15 -0400, Peter Larsen wrote
(in article ):

What I am saying is that the room will influence the sound of the instrument
no matter the mic 2 instrument distance.


and what I'm saying is If I stay tight with a good mic, I can dismiss a lot
of room interaction. I do it here all the time.

Regards,

Ty Ford


--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Ty Ford]

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 12:21:30 -0400, Laurence Payne wrote
(in article ):

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 11:43:09 -0400, Ty Ford
wrote:

If you stay tight with a good mic, you can dismiss a lot of room
interaction.

A lot. But can you get it down to trivial?

absolutely! my room isn't an "ordinary" room. It's damped, so it's tight but
not dead and it's 25' x 35' so because the sound has farther to go before it
hits my various treatments it has a lot less energy when it makes its way
back to the mic. With the cmc641 up close you don't hear much room at all. I
add reverb - two actually - to create the space.

Regards,

Ty Ford

--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Ty Ford]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 00:02:04 -0400, hank alrich wrote
(in article ):

Laurence Payne wrote:

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 11:43:09 -0400, Ty Ford
wrote:

If you stay tight with a good mic, you can dismiss a lot of room
interaction.

A lot. But can you get it down to trivial?

Not without getting so close to the instrument that you aren't hearing
it in what I consider a natural manner.


What YOU consider natural and what I consider natural are probably different.
My Martin sounds fine with a cmc641 pointed at the neck joint.

Watch the link breaks, but he http://tinyurl.com/qrqbw4

You do need a really good sounding guitar. I have had a few in here that
don't sound that good and no mic or eq on the planet will improve them.

Regards,

Ty Ford






--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Ty Ford]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 06:04:23 -0400, Laurence Payne wrote
(in article ):

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 21:02:04 -0700, (hank alrich)
wrote:

If you stay tight with a good mic, you can dismiss a lot of room
interaction.

A lot. But can you get it down to trivial?

Not without getting so close to the instrument that you aren't hearing
it in what I consider a natural manner.

Meaning that the instrument sounds better with some room sound? But
if we can get the BAD room sound down to a trivial level, we have
pretty good ways of adding better room sound.

absolutely!

Ty Ford

--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Ty Ford]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 14:13:39 -0400, Laurence Payne wrote
(in article ):

OK. We've got a pretty good consensus on this.

Now my follow-on question. Why vocal booths?

Um, what is your idea of the consensus?

Regards,

Ty

--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Ty Ford]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 14:13:39 -0400, Laurence Payne wrote
(in article ):

OK. We've got a pretty good consensus on this.

Now my follow-on question. Why vocal booths?

For when you're tracking vocals and instruments together to get the groove.

Regards,

Ty Ford


--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[hank alrich]

Ty Ford wrote:

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 14:13:39 -0400, Laurence Payne wrote
(in article ):

OK. We've got a pretty good consensus on this.

Now my follow-on question. Why vocal booths?

For when you're tracking vocals and instruments together to get the groove.

And you don't have the room and/or the space do do it without that type
of isolation.

OTOH, if you have a space, for example, like Fred Remmert has at Cedar
Creek Recording, you might be able to achieve remarkable isolation with
others playing in the same room while the vocal goes down. Granted, not
everybody has that kind of facility, and Fred also has rooms isolated
from yet adjoining the main room, with visual communication throughout.

This brings us full circle to mic patterns and placement within a given
space. In every case we make decisions about how to best capture what's
going down, as we interpret some version of "best".

This is part of why recording can be so much fun. There are so many ways
to go about getting a wonderful sound.

Several years ago I spent three days working to get something I liked
with Doug Harman on cello and me on guitar. I tried every angle of close
mic'ing I could imagine, and none of them worked worth a ****. Oh, yeah,
it all sounded okay, but none of it sounded quite right. On the fourth
and last day I put a pair of MD441's on a very short stand about eight
feet away from us, in a neither ORTF nor X/Y config, and bingo, there we
were, as if we were live in the room, any room in which I played-back
the tracks.

The way that worked best wasn't by the book, and wasn't like anything
I'd done before. But it _was_ what worked in that situation. I just
wished to hell I'd been smart enough to move more rapidly through the
rest of the options I tried. g

--
ha
shut up and play your guitar

[hank alrich]

Ty Ford wrote:

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 00:02:04 -0400, hank alrich wrote
(in article ):

Laurence Payne wrote:

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 11:43:09 -0400, Ty Ford
wrote:

If you stay tight with a good mic, you can dismiss a lot of room
interaction.

A lot. But can you get it down to trivial?

Not without getting so close to the instrument that you aren't hearing
it in what I consider a natural manner.


What YOU consider natural and what I consider natural are probably different.
My Martin sounds fine with a cmc641 pointed at the neck joint.

Of course it does. Every good guitar "sounds fine" tracked like that.
However, when is the last time you put your _ears_ there to listen to a
guitarist? That's what I mean by "natural".

Very close mic'ing has been mightily in vogue since we got a whole lot
of tracks to work with back in the 1970's. Many folks have never heard
guitar recorded any other way. But there are other entirely viable ways,
and some of them more closely resemble presenting a guitarist in the way
we might _naturally_ hear them playing live in a room.

Watch the link breaks, but he http://tinyurl.com/qrqbw4

You do need a really good sounding guitar. I have had a few in here that
don't sound that good and no mic or eq on the planet will improve them.

Right on,Ty. The quality of the source turns out to be one of the
biggest, maybe routinely _the_ biggest factor in the qualtiy of the
recorded sound, assuming the player is worth some salt.

I always enjoy the quality of your recordings, even if I choose to
approach it differently when I can.

--
ha
shut up and play your guitar

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

Ty Ford wrote:

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 12:08:15 -0400, Peter Larsen wrote
(in article ):

What I am saying is that the room will influence the sound of the
instrument no matter the mic 2 instrument distance.

and what I'm saying is If I stay tight with a good mic, I can dismiss
a lot of room interaction. I do it here all the time.

No contest on the claim that you can get more direct vs. reflected sound by
putting the mic close to the instrument, but how do you dismiss the room
interaction on the instrument by putting the mic closer?

Ty Ford

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

hank alrich wrote:

At a chamber music recording at the New Carlsberg Glyptotek ...

That might be a good example of something I mentioned in a thread
about dealing with a given room for tracking guitar, and my thoughts
of placement of the artist within the room. In the center of the room
is often the worst position in my experience. One suffers multiple
near-coincident reflection arrival times, and the resulting comb
filtering trashes the sound of the source, both in the the room and at
the mics. Room treatment can help, but even in a nicely adjusted room
a different position often helps a lot.

The center line is always a bad place to be, the more so with an A type
glass roof as in that room .... or with a vaulted ceiling, beware of getting
a mic in a focal point of those. Try singing gently while walkin around in a
room and feel its feedback-influcence on your larynx, there are good spots
and bad spots.

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Arkansan Raider]

Misifus wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:
hank alrich wrote:
Laurence Payne wrote:

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 11:43:09 -0400, Ty Ford
wrote:

If you stay tight with a good mic, you can dismiss a lot of room
interaction.
A lot. But can you get it down to trivial?
Not without getting so close to the instrument that you aren't hearing
it in what I consider a natural manner.

Well, it depends on the instrument, too. It's possible to spot-mike a
flute up way close and get a good representation of the sound of the
instrument.... but not a fiddle.
--scott


Just an observation, this has been a very useful and informative thread.
Thanks a lot.

-Raf


I completely concur.

---Jeff

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

Ty Ford wrote:

absolutely! my room isn't an "ordinary" room. It's damped, so it's
tight but not dead and it's 25' x 35' so because the sound has
farther to go before it hits my various treatments it has a lot less
energy when it makes its way back to the mic. With the cmc641 up
close you don't hear much room at all. I add reverb - two actually -
to create the space.

Try adding a sprinkle of reverb to the room .... an omni pair, an old
3-head taperecorder and a pair of bipolars or L200's may do just fine. Your
guitar can not respond to post factum reverb as it does to real reverb.

Ty Ford

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Arny Krueger]

"hank alrich" wrote in message

Laurence Payne wrote:

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 11:43:09 -0400, Ty Ford
wrote:

If you stay tight with a good mic, you can dismiss a
lot of room interaction.

A lot. But can you get it down to trivial?

Not without getting so close to the instrument that you
aren't hearing it in what I consider a natural manner.

On the one hand, the room sound contributes a great deal of what we
perceive to be natural sound. Anything will sound unnatural without it.
OTOH, if you are close, what you record is dominated by the sound of that
side of the instrument, while most strings and percussion and many woodwinds
and brass instruments are multi-directional with distinct sonic signatures
in different directions.

There's a highly regarded local studio that has a pretty good sounding large
room, but still does most of their work by close-micing and adding in what
most find to be a natural room sound using a classic Lexicon processor.

[Scott Dorsey]

Ty Ford wrote:
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 14:13:39 -0400, Laurence Payne wrote
(in article ):

OK. We've got a pretty good consensus on this.

Now my follow-on question. Why vocal booths?

For when you're tracking vocals and instruments together to get the groove.

If anything, I think it kills a lot of the groove to put the vocals and
the instruments in different rooms. But sometimes you gotta do what you
gotta do in the name of isolation.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Ty Ford]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2009 21:06:47 -0400, hank alrich wrote
(in article ):

OTOH, if you have a space, for example, like Fred Remmert has at Cedar Creek
Recording, you might be able to achieve remarkable isolation with others
playing in the same room while the vocal goes down. Granted, not everybody
has that kind of facility, and Fred also has rooms isolated from yet
adjoining the main room, with visual communication throughout.

Or the room George Massenburg had in Nashville until recently. He did the
Subdudes there and they were very happy with it.

I'm also thinking about Rudy Van Gelder in NJ. His space and careful use of
directional mics have resulted in some wonderful recordings.

Regards,

Ty Ford


--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Ty Ford]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009 06:16:47 -0400, Peter Larsen wrote
(in article ):

Ty Ford wrote:

absolutely! my room isn't an "ordinary" room. It's damped, so it's
tight but not dead and it's 25' x 35' so because the sound has
farther to go before it hits my various treatments it has a lot less
energy when it makes its way back to the mic. With the cmc641 up
close you don't hear much room at all. I add reverb - two actually -
to create the space.

Try adding a sprinkle of reverb to the room .... an omni pair, an old
3-head taperecorder and a pair of bipolars or L200's may do just fine. Your
guitar can not respond to post factum reverb as it does to real reverb.

Ty Ford

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

No, and that's OK for me. But "real reverb" can be extremely unattractive;
worse than the Alesis 3060. Now we're into architecture and primary/secondary
fields and near field, point source and far field.

I'm going to guess that most folks here don't get the chance to get into a
really nice sounding space where you can get far enough away to meld the
direct, early and late reflections into something that sounds nice.

Regards,

Ty

--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

Ty Ford wrote:

I'm going to guess that most folks here don't get the chance to get
into a really nice sounding space where you can get far enough away
to meld the direct, early and late reflections into something that
sounds nice.

Could be, could be. To few people recording chamber music perhaps ... it is
a really good place to learn.

Ty

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Richard Webb[_2_]]

Lawrence Payne writes:
OK. We've got a pretty good consensus on this.

Now my follow-on question. Why vocal booths?


They work well for scratch vocals. I might do something
with flats for a microclimate for the vocalist when doing
keeper takes, but during rhythm section tracking often a
booth is the only solution.

A friend of mine in western ILlinois did it right in his
garage build out though, nice sized booth which could be
used for vocal or acoustic guitar with enough actual
physical space where you could place mics properly. Still a bit boxy for my tastes, but better than some.

Regards,
Richard
--
| Fidonet: Richard Webb 1:116/901
| Internet:
| \\--- Pull YourHead out to reply via email. ---//
| via Waldo's Place USA Fidonet-Internet Gateway Sit

[Richard Webb[_2_]]

Hank Alrich writes:
HOw to make a silk purse from a sow's ear: Start with a
silk sow.

LOL! That's very good, Richard! Thank you.

Don't blame me, blame Fletcher for that one, I just borrowed it.

Regards,
Richard
--
| Fidonet: Richard Webb 1:116/901
| Internet:
| \\--- Pull YourHead out to reply via email. ---//
| via Waldo's Place USA Fidonet-Internet Gateway Sit

[Ty Ford]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009 14:52:43 -0400, Peter Larsen wrote
(in article ):

Ty Ford wrote:

I'm going to guess that most folks here don't get the chance to get
into a really nice sounding space where you can get far enough away
to meld the direct, early and late reflections into something that
sounds nice.

Could be, could be. To few people recording chamber music perhaps ... it is
a really good place to learn.

Ty

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

Peter,

Absolutely. I think the reason you and I have differing perspectives on this
point is the spaces we have and what we're recording.

As it should be.

Regards,

Ty Ford


--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA