You don't get stereo by close miking four instruments. You get multi mono.

This is true.

Close miking a chamber group is an invitation to disaster.

Only if (A) one don't know what one is doing, (B) one mics each instrument too
closely, like less than 3 or 4 feet away, & (C) one conceives chamber music's
only permissible venue to be highly reverberant classical music halls. If the
repertoire is 19th century or earlier, I agree with your premise about
impending disaster, but if it is contemporary music it may, depending on the
writing, benefit from a more hands-on approach to recording.

First, you are invading the players' "space" and they don't like that.

Studio savvy players are OK with that, although I'm never putting a mic within
a player's range of movement.

Second there isn't anything that sounds much worse than a close mic'd string
instrument. You get a ton of hf information that distance attenuates.

Miking from off of the player's left shoulder, from under the body of the
fiddle or straight down the length of the neck alleviates much of the high
frequency exaggeration that attends close miking. Again, I'm calling a mic that
is 3 feet away a close mic here.


Scott Fraser