Topic: Woodwind quintet

[Carrera2]

I will be recording a woodwind quintet (the classic flute/oboe/horn/basoon/clarinet quintet) both in rehearsal and in perfomance in a couple of weeks. Any thoughts about how to mic? I have read some threads about string quartets, and I dare say the balance will be different for this ensemble. A huge unknown to me right now is what the room will sound like. It will be in a church's building, so the acoustics could range from the reverberaton of the Taj Mahal to a dead flat room. Nonetheless, I thought it would be good to start thinking about mic placement and I don't have experience with mic'ing this type of ensemble other than from far out in the audience of a large performance hall.

My first two thoughts are to use a coincident pair fairly high above and slightly in front of the ensemble, aimed at the ensemble. The second would to be to also use a coincident pair but 10/12/15 or more feet in front of the ensemble but more at mid-instrument height.

Other ideas?

[dean]

Will they let you set up on stage?  If so, see if they'll arrange in a horseshoe position, then place omnis Healy method or baffled (or, if you've got 'em, fig8's Blumlein) right smack in the middle of 'em.  I've recorded cello, guitar, clarinet & bass clarinet, flute and sax ensembles this way with excellent results.

Have fun.  This can be an ideal recording situation for you!

[boojum]

I'm with the DFC up high and aimed at the group.  I use this for chorales.  I use omnis for this in a Williams array, about 40 cm apart.  Works pretty well, but I am always looking for improving my technique.

[Carrera2]

Will they let you set up on stage?  If so, see if they'll arrange in a horseshoe position, then place omnis Healy method or baffled (or, if you've got 'em, fig8's Blumlein) right smack in the middle of 'em.  I've recorded cello, guitar, clarinet & bass clarinet, flute and sax ensembles this way with excellent results.

Have fun.  This can be an ideal recording situation for you!

I can run the Blumlein fig8's with a pair of AKG 414s, but I am trying to imagine the how strange this might sound, given that folks sitting across from each other will be recorded in opposite sides of one fig8. Should sound as though the players changed places. Hell, I'll give it a shot, and record some cards DFC as a main pair.

Dress rehearsal is tomorrow, wish me luck, and thanks for the suggestions and counsel! Plus T all around.

[dean]

blumlein shouldn't be set up that close.
If you're getting the players postions to change, aurally, with Blumlein, then you are far too close.

There is a critical line that you should not cross; and this is an imaginary line that would close the players on-stage presence from an open "U", to that of a closed "D".
If you cross that line with blumlein, then you will get that flipping of players, which is wrong - too close.

edit:
to resemble my native language - english

Huh.  Never thought about it like that.  Do you have a rough gestimate of how many feet out that line is, Moke?

[Carrera2]

all that, ^^, and I could have just said; keep your entire sound image in front of the front 90º lobes.

OK, I placed the Blumlein fig8 pair about four feet (before I saw the above counsel) in front of the ensemble, fairly low, say at the flutist's instrument height. I ran some cards near coincident about a foot behind that, up about 7 feet, and pointed down on the ensemble. Since we had the sanctuary to ourselves, it was very quiet.

I am going to do some listening now. While onsite, and through headphones, I noticed that the fig8 did have good ambience, the cards a lot more detail. I may post a couple of samples if time is my friend. Maybe a matrix in the works.

Thanks all.

[dean]

+T, Moke.  Nice to know - that's about what I've been doing, though I had visions of dropping that stand right in the middle of the horseshoe for one band in particular.  Now I'll know that'd be a mess!

[Carrera2]

Just a sample from the performance today. Ran the AKG 480 cards in an ORTF pattern somewhat overhead and pointed toward the center of the ensemble, at least to sight. The 414's were run XY today (not bidirectional).  The 480s ran through my UA5 then digi into the 744, the 414s ran straight into the 744.

They are different, but the differences are subtle. More detail and stereo imaging with the 480s, IMHO.

[bl6216@yahoo.com]

It came out sounding really good. Nice job

-Brian

[Gutbucket]

Just found this thread today.  Great recording opportunity!  I'll give your samples a listen tonight.  Looks like a good placement from the photos if I had to guess.  +T for the minimally visually intrusive setup for two stands and stereo rigs.

Dean, I've used Blumlein close to a small ensemble with great results, but with this caveat-  Imagine the mics making a 'X' pattern and extend the imaginary lines of the 'X' to the walls.  Traditionally all the players need to be inside the front 'V' part of the 'X'.  With an ensemble of much size that constraint pushes the mics farther away to make enough room for them to fit.  The problematic areas to stay away from are the side '>' and '<' sections of the 'X'.  Those are the out of phase sections, bad for capturing direct instrument sound, but good for hall ambience that sounds enveloping and 'outside the speakers' and I suspect what makes the ambience capture aspect of blumlein sound more like omnis to me than other directional mic techniques. 

Now here's the cool part for a small ensemble. The back '^' section of the 'X' is also useful for direct instrument sound.  On playback, the image of instruments placed there will be reversed L-R and overlayed on the front part of the 'X', but just as accurate in it's imaging as the front 'V' section.  In a recording situation with an audience present, it's difficult to do that since the audience is in the '^' and players placed there would have their backs to them.  But if you have a situation where you can arrange the players in a circle with two open sides, you can distribute the players in those front & back sections to allow them enough elbow room while getting them closer to the mics than would be possible only using the front 'V', which also allows them to play 'to each other'.

This all follows the same principle Mike is talking about with the 'U' and 'D' shapes, just with different terminology describing the shape of the mic pattern instead of the ensemble layout.

[Gutbucket]

I've never done the above with an audience performance for the reason I mentioned, but I've thought that given the right scenario, it might be possible to do something even more radical by turning the blumlein array 90 deg, placing it at the center of the stage and having the players on either side of it, with the audience now in the side '^' of the pattern and the empty backstage wall in the other side 'V'.  Using the ensemble shape analogy, the players would form a wide 'U' with a hole at the bottom and the mic at the center.    Say you've set up the mics so that the front 'V' of the blumlien array faces audience left (stage right). That means the audience is completely off to the left of the mic array, but since that quadrant is one of the ambient out of phase sections, they will be heard to both sides on playback, without sharp imaging and perhaps sounding somewhat 'out side the speakers'.  The players in the back, at bottom shoulders of the 'U' would be closer to the mics than those at the top near the audience, so you would hopefully arrange them with that in mind and because one side of the ensemble will be flipped L-R in the playback image another really interesting thing should happen.  Even though both 'close' players would be near the right limit of the mic array's pickup angle (remember, the mic array is facing to the left), on playback one will be heard at speaker L and the other at speaker R.  Likewise the farthest players that are at the tips of the 'U' will also appear near the speakers but farther back, the players in the center of the 'U' uprights will image in the center of the stereo illusion.

Accurate in an absolute sense, certainly not.  But it could provide a really cool playback illusion with tons of depth, sharp imaging of the players, diffuse imaging ambient sounding audience and rear stage wall reflections, and would get the mics even further from the audience, improving the always difficult musician/audience pickup ratio for a stereo recording.

I'd love to try that someday..

[Gutbucket]

Oh yeah, another +T in 12 for your auto-X avatar.  I won EStock ('95 miata) last Sunday and when working the course was amazed to watch a guy just fly around in a GT3 like he was on rails.

My co-driver and I joked about driving 2 hours there and back to drive for 4 minutes each.