Recorded a brass band

I'm just about finishing off editing up our brass band christmas carols CD which the Young Enterprise company is going to sell at a local Christmas Fayre. It's got 8 tracks, and lasts 13:27

Anyone like to hear a track?

 

Sure!

What equipment did you use? What mics? Close miked or traditional stereo spread mics or a combination? Always interested in the details.

 

We Wish you a Merry Christmas

It was : A tuba, 2 alto sax, a barry sax, 'bone, 2 trumpets and a euph'.

I was a bit low on resources, so I was forced to do a stereo spread rather than close mike-ing, which wasn't ideal in the space we were in, but it worked ok. I used some Sony DCM-55's with an inline XLR amp (which had no batteries, not that we found out till I had to trouble shoot the signal path...).

I used my 16 channel studer mixer, mixed down to two subgroups, limited the outs of them using onboard compression, added about 2dB there, went into my PC into Cool Edit pro 2.1 (before audition).

I mixed the stereo signal on the mixer with pan, and used a stereo fader clip to keep them even.

I've only used those mics a few times before, and they are really rather bright. I had to compensate with the EQ on the channels, a bit of shelfing made the sound more managable, but you'll notice on the recording it hasn't lost all of that brightness.

The mics were about 10ft in the air, stuck onto a boom mic stand. I think that position let me get the best sound from the vertical instruments (tuba, euph, sax).

Each track has pretty much the same settings, the only things that changed were the compression threshold and ratio, and the EQ very slightly.

Anyway, enjoy

 

Came out pretty good Goldy. It does sound just a little off in the high end, but that sounds like the room acoustics.

If you've got a half-way decent room, have you ever stuck a mono mike well back from the main pair to pick up some room ambience? That can be mixed in judiciously to add a bit of space to the sound without going to artificial reverbs.

 

Hmm, I've never had the chance to work in a half-way decent room... but that sounds like an interesting idea... artifical reverbs have always been better than accoustics, such as they were...

And also, after listening to those recordings more than a healthy number of times, I noticed that there was a sort of buzzing humming at about -48dB on the left channel, at about 30-50Hz. Blinkin annoying!

 

LOL. No, artificial reverbs haven't ALWAYS been better than natural room acoustics. The 3-mike setup predates the good current digital reverbs. Predates multi-tracking for that matter, when they had to capture it live to one or two tracks during the initial performance. And in a good room, can give excellent results.

Well, if you can isolate the frequency, you may be able to remove it with a narrow notch filter, if you've got a parametric available to play with. With the instruments you've got, you won't have much significant content down that low.

 

I used a FFT filter to get rid of it, or at least try, it has a few harmonics going on as well so you can still hear it but its not buzzing.

And what i meant by artificial reverbs were always better than real ones, is that in all situations I've been in, they've been better. When I'm recording bands I'm always in a room that has as little accoustics as possible, so it sounds completley dead if you don't put some artificial reverb on it

I've yet to see a venue that I can record in that has good enough accoustics to warrant not using artificial reverb (unless it is supposed to be a "live" performance, of course).