Category: Recording

Recording a piano conterto

Post author By admin
Post date January 18, 2006
2 Comments on Recording a piano conterto

Last weekend I had the pleasure of recording an amazing conert pianist. This lady is a stroke doctor during the day and a pianist on the side. She’s so serious about piano that she flies to New York and even to Paris to take lessons.

The setup

The hall is a great smaller venue which seats about 200 very comfortably. There isn’t a bad seat in the house and the atmosphere is great.

It’s quite simple, a Steinway in the middle of the stage.

There are may different ways to record a gig like this. If you want more of the “live” sound you could to an XY stereo mic configuration in front of the piano or even in front of the stage to get more of the ambience and the audience. I chose a more close micing approach because we were more concerned with the quality of the piano sound than the audience.

I used two Audio Technica 4050 large diaphragm condenser mics for a stereo image. I placed one over the low end strings and one over the high end. The concept is they’d share the center range and the left and right would be low and high tones respectively. I didn’t worry about a perfect 90 degree angle XY because they were far enough apart and so close to the source.

Since the recording was only two channels I was able to bring a nice small setup. I used an M-Audio USB Duo as my preamp. The Duo just hooks into the USB on my 17″ Apple Powerbook. My recording software of choice is Cubase SX.

My Cubase capture settings were 32 bit recording at 44,100 sampling rate.

Backup Backup

The small silver device to the right of my rig picture is a minidisc recorder. Whenever I do gigs like this where it’s live and you only get one shot at the recording, I run a 2nd capture device. If the laptop crashes or there’s a problem with the capture, I have a backup on the minidisc. The MD would certainly not be as high quality, but I’d have something.

The result

The performer was awesome and my rig captured her perfectly. I didn’t even get a sound check but my guess on her levels was perfect. I didn’t even adjust my input gain at all. The very peak of her volume level was 1 or 2 dB below peak.

PRO SOUND BLOG FORUM IS BACK!

Post author By admin
Post date January 7, 2006

Hello fellow musicians and friends! It has been since September 2005 that the Pro Sound Blog Forum has been running. A hacker brought the site down completely. I had the same thing happen to two other forums I ran on the same forum software. One forum was quite large and I HAD to figure out how to recover it.

Long story short, I’ve recovered all the users and posts and installed a different forum software that is less “popular” and hopefully less prone to hacking. The only items missing are most likely attached image files and avatars so you’ll need to reload them. Other than that all is working! I’ll be working to make the “look” into something better down the road.

This board was never the biggest on the web, but it was a great spot for some very talented and smart musicians to talk about their trade. So I invite you to come back to the forum and let’s get this board rolling again!

The forum is now in a new web location: https://forum.prosoundblog.com

Boneheads Gear Gigs Musicians Random Rants Recording

Categories are cool

Post author By admin
Post date January 7, 2006

Since my switch from the dreaded blogger lame ass blogging software to WordPress I’m now able to take advantage of some new features here.

I’m now working on categorizing all the posts. I have 8 categories currently:

Boneheads: A category dedicated to stupid people and the things they do.
Gear: Recording gear, musicial instruments, computers or any gear I deal with.
Gigs: Stories about my gigs or other peoples gigs.
Random: A blanket category when nothing else works.
Rants: When shit pisses me off I use this category.
Recording: Recording studio war stories, recording techniques etc.
Uncategorized: Means I have yet to decide what category to put the post in.

Now some posts may have multiple categories. For example: A dumbass musician jumps on my stage and plays my drums. He’s drunk and he breaks my snare head and won’t get away from my kit. That post alone could be a combined boneheads, gear, gigs, musicians and rants. I can already see that the boneheads and musicians categories will be selected together many times.

I’m about 25% of the way through categorizing the old posts so be patient.

Boneheads Recording

Stereo is your friend

Post author By admin
Post date November 23, 2005

I do a little “consulting” now and then for people who can’t figure out why their recordings suck. This is one of those occasions:

This guy has a home studio and he’s got a TON of killer equipment. His gear is top of the line, worth thousands and thousands of bucks. But for the amount of gear he has, he can’t make a decent sounding recording. (Most crappy studio engineers think buying more gear is the answer, but it’s not)…

He has me listen to one of his recordings and sure enough, it sucks. It takes me about 7 or 8 seconds to figure out what his problem is. I reach down to his console and “do my magic.” BOOM! His mix opens up and all the sudden you can hear everything much more clearly!

He starts to freak out. “Wow! What did you do? That sounds so much better! You’re amazing!” I then inform him what a frigging PAN KNOB is. He had all of his channels panned dead center. $50,000 worth of gear and he doesn’t know what a pan knob is.

Someone shoot me now.

Recording

Advise on getting rid of hums in the studio

Post author By admin
Post date November 15, 2005
2 Comments on Advise on getting rid of hums in the studio

One of my buddies is having hum problems in his home studio. He asked some advice on getting rid of hums in the studio. He is Q, I am A:

Q: First of all the outlet I have isn’t grounded, and there is only one in the room. So I know I need to get the electricity grounded.

A: You should have all the gear on the same circuit, and only ONE piece of gear grounded to the wall. Use those little orange lifters on everything else. If you ground to multiple locations that’s where the hum comes from.

Q: It’s still humming a bit if I run an extension from a grounded outlet, so I think that my next course of action would be to replace all the dimmer switches. But would this need to be by the circuit they are on? By vicinity if they are not in the same area?

A: The dimmers may cause a problem if they’re on the same circuit, or if you have guitars and other items which pick up the RF. Turn the lights off and see if the hum goes away.

Q: Route power cables separate from audio cables, and if they have to cross, do it at right angles?

A: If you have shitty cable I guess. I never needed to worry about that. I just had to worry about power supplies getting too close to each other so their magnetic fields interfered with each other. Get rid of the Radio Shack cable and get some Mogami or Canare cable.

Q: Any other suggestions? Have any of you had luck with power conditioners and such? Replace the Alesis RA-100 with a better amp? Run only balanced cable? Add isolation transformers? Buy new cable? Buy cases for the computers that are isolated? Buy LCD displays instead of CRT’s?

A: Maybe the CRTs might cause some problems. Turn them off and see if the hum goes away. That’s a similar situation to the dimmers. I’ve never had to go the power conditioner route. The RA-100 wouldn’t be the problem. Balanced cable can’t hurt, but I’ve had hundreds of unbalanced connections at my place with no hum problems. GET RID OF ALL BAD CABLE, GROUND CORRECTLY AND START FROM THERE.