Recordings- using different horns?

[ttf_davdud101]

Hey, guys!
So, for upwards of 7 years I've been big on both home and "semi-pro"/project-based studio recording in a variety of media (realize I'm young ). I lately have had a strong desire to work on some big band and somewhat 'classical'/(pop/film music) projects, and I was wondering what you guys would do when it comes to recordings mulitple parts; would you switch horns to attempt to emulate the slightly different tone quality that would be?

When I've done my multitracking for big band stuff, I tend to use four mouthpieces and two horns- a small bore and a large bore, of course- to cover the trombone section and try to fill all the frequencies. I'm not sure if this is a common practice, or if there's even any point to doing it this way besides making third and bass books a bit more playable with the addition of a trigger.
Does mic placement, for example, make a bigger deal than equipment choice in the home studio? EQing? playing style?

Mind you guys - I've got some pretty decent gear. Nothing *amazing*, everything is sort of "budget quality" gear, but the mics I'm working with give me good sound, my horns are awesome, and I really hope I do a decent enough job to make my equipment and the elements of my studio shine 

I'm just digging for clues here - I'll probably continue to use multiple setups to make my horn sections, and I've even been considering trying different horns to flesh out the trumpets. But I'll be making alot of demoes in the coming year to find these things out. Any tips for the moment would be great!

[ttf_Exzaclee]

Here

I did this with a big band album about 3 years ago. That didn't turn out perfect, but I learned a lot from doing it. It was the first project I engineered and produced from cradle to grave. Due to extreme time limits (4 recording sessions and 3or4 dubbing sessions) this was how it had to be. I think Big Bands should ALWAYS be recorded "live" - but I was doing my Masters project and I didn't want to do yet another quintet album.

When overdubbing yourself, you're going to get phase issues (i've always described this as a "glassy sound" that permeates when overdubs are playing at the same time.) Someone with more technical knowledge can probably explain what's going on there better than  I.

As far as recording multiple parts, here's what I do:

1) if possible, find a room that would be big enough to put 4 trombones in. The larger the better (within reason of course - some rooms sound bad no matter the size.)  You get a much more natural sound the more distance you create between mic and horn, but as distance from the horn increases, so too does the room sound. Keep in mind that you are not just recording trombone, you are recording the room as well. Sometimes you have to mic everything close because the room sucks.

2) Set up 4 chairs in their proper place around the mic (2,1,3,Bass or whatever configuration you want.)

3) Record each part from the chair it's supposed to be in. If you record each part sitting in the same spot, the track will sound like you have 4 guys sitting in the same spot - and since you are those "4 guys", you're going to have phasing issues. Put the mic in a good central location to pick up your lead, and leave it there for the other parts you record from different chairs

4) If you have different horns available, use a different one on each part.

* If you have a small room, there's only so far away you can move the mic. The reflections in the room are giving your part a "location" - so you want to cut down on those reflections so all the other parts you record don't all sound like they are sitting in the same chair right in front of you (panning doesn't really fix this as well as you'd think.) You can really cut down on these by creating baffles around your mic with non reflective sound absorbing material (foam rubber, carpet, blankets, etc. can be used to do this. Basically, you just envelop the mic on all sides (save the business end) so you cut down on the reflections of sound coming off the walls and every other hard surface in the room. This will sound very sterile (and unflattering.)

5) When EQ-ing, I like to listen for "location" before I start any kind of EQ. Do I hear my horns right to left? In a small room, using different mic placement (center, left, right, far right, etc.) on each track gives you a little different location, but it'll still sound like the parts are "on top of eachother." You can use panning to get a bit more separation. Once you have this how you want it, you can begin EQ-ing. First off, I like to put a subtle variation on each EQ to mimic the natural differences between players. Maybe a 1.5db bump in the mids on the 3rd part, HP filter on 1st and 2nd, slight 1.5 db bump around 2.5K on the lead, take out 750Hz by 1db on the 2nd, etc.... small adjustments that will give each horn a slightly different timbre and not sound so much like "you". Keep going back and checking this with the whole section - you want to get rid of the "glassy" sound you get from the phasing without making the whole section sound wonky.  Sometimes you may find you need to have much more drastic differences in the EQ between parts to make the whole sound better. That's okay.

*A note on EQ - you can spend all day making the 3rd trombone sound awesome, but then when you add it into the mix it doesn't fit. This is the biggest issue with mixing - don't try to make each instrument sound perfect by itself. Everything sounds "better" with the addition of lows (and certain mids) but makes the end result muddy. Make your adjustments in small increments, check with the whole, and repeat. Limit yourself to 15 minutes at a time when mixing, taking frequent breaks to rest your ears.


You can get rid of some of the phasing issues by adjusting the timing of a track forward or backward by a millisecond or two. A few years ago I wrote the trombones for a couple of tracks on a salsa album - I had just figured out how to record audio into Digital Performer so I just did the tracks in my garage. The phasing was awful, and I sheepishly submitted the raw tracks to the producer with an apology and an offer to schedule a date at a "real" studio to fix them. The mastering engineer adjusted each track a millisecond or so away from the other and worked a little EQ magic and the resulting sound was so much better. Of course in the final mix, the trombones were relegated way in the back of the mix - i guess some guys don't dig the WIllie Colón approach to mixing salsa. Their loss...

[ttf_davdud101]

Fantastic reply Exzaclee! Got a link to that album? Any clips? I'd like to hear how it turned out.
I haven't done a lot of "heavy" stuff with this concept yet (by now I've recorded two separate big band tracks, probably 2 years apart), but I'm looking forward to putting the concepts into practice. I'm aware of phasing issues and stuff that can happen with overdubs and all that - it's more a matter of learning the best methods for quality recording.
I never thought about even placing the trombones in different locations in relation to the mic. I think I'll try using two microphones and (as you said) setting up four chairs and then using that to produce a single stereo mix of the four trombones- with mic bleed, in stereo.

I'm also watching some videos from the WDR big band to see how they mic their winds, and there's actually a LOT of info that can be dragged out of there on how to mic and mix the band.

[ttf_Exzaclee]

Yeah... here's one I posted quite a while back. Every time I listen to this I hear a lot of things I want to go back and fix. I may do this again this summer, when I'm hoping to be able to get the whole band in the studio for a day. It's been a great teacher for me, just a number of issues that show me what not to do next time. One of the good things about the bad balance in this recording (my fault, not the musicians by any means) is that I can hear every single mistake. (There are a lot, most of this stuff is one or two takes)

The rhythm section, trombone and tenor parts were recorded together "live" in the studio over the course of one of the initial sessions, I think this is the 2nd take (I don't think the guitar tremelos were in the 1st take). This piece was written to work for a quintet and big band setting

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n2e7fmnl3j6bt5r/3%20Covenant.aiff?dl=0

In terms of the phasing thing we were discussion earlier, there's a chord with a lot of woodwinds and muted brass at about 2:30. Now, in a room with 13 horns (WWs, muted brass) and a rhythm section separated only by some good baffles, you can get a thick, dense sound (think a big hairy cloud of light grey smoke) out of this chord - but I had to overdub everyone's part and I just couldn't really approximate how this sounds live. This is as close as I could get. I found I could get a little close by messing with the reverb but this made things really unrealistic so I chucked it. When you overdub you miss out on all those luscious under and overtones that instruments produce when they play together in the same room and no amount of knob fiddling will get that in there.

At 2:40 - still some phasing issues here but I tried some pretty severe mic placement to cut down on most of it. Now the room the overdubs were done in was small. You could sit two people abreast in there so getting a realistic spread in the trombones was difficult using the room. So I had one over dub recorded with the mic about 3 feet to the right (so he'd sound like he's on my left) and the other one 3 feet to the opposite side. I added some subtle EQ alterations (and slapped a HP filter on the parts to reduce the room noise) to try and make "me not sound like me". The end result wasn't as bad as I'd hoped, but still needs some work to sound.

The main issue with doing an album like this is that you end up basically close mic-ing everything, so it's hard to get any realistic depth in there - even with the really expensive stuff.  This also adds a lot to the lows, which have to be EQ'd out to avoid a really muddy recording, but you have to be judicious in your use of this or you end up with an empty sounding recording. So many of the problems I had could have been easily solved by hiring a section to do the overdubs in front of one or two mics.


I have a notebook full of notes like this - I had meant to go back and re-balance everything, and re-record some of the dubbed parts, but as it looks now, I think I'm just going to focus on the new project and re-record my favorite stuff from this album as a part of that.

[ttf_davdud101]

This is marvelous, Zac!! Super-great example of how to make a good big band mix. I can certainly say I'd be far more than satisfied if I got results like this. I don't even currently have access to a real rhythm section, and my saxophonists aren't quite good enough *at the moment* so for the time being they're being substituted by virtual horns- something I'll hopefully be changing, or finding a new solution for, soon.

I can certainly hear that stylistically, it's all one player - although if I hadn't known that it was one guy, I wouldn't have been the wiser. So bravo on that! Exactly what kind of mics and mic-placement did you use for this recording? You said there was overdubbing, which would of course mean *not live*, but how much was done live, with the big band?

I play occasionally in my church's big band, usually 3rd or bass trombone or 4th trumpet, and when we do studio recordings (6 - 8 strings in addition to a full big band), there seems to be a tendency for a lack of good-quality swing-feeling/overall tightness. Unfortunately, they book out the best studio in the area, so we get *very* little time to check up on those things as a result of the cost. So even though it might be done live, that doesn't mean it's equal quality to as if it were done section-by-section, for example.

[ttf_Exzaclee]

Thanks for the kind words, but seriously you'll want to get some other albums to hear how this stuff is supposed to be done. Mariah Schneider's Concert in The Garden is a wonderful album and was recorded superbly. I'm also a big fan of the stuff Columbia used to do back in the day. Harry Connick's Red Light Blue Light and the Gil Evans/Miles Davis Miles Ahead are two great examples of the Columbia sound. I'm pretty sure the Columbia stuff has something to do with the room they recorded in (and of course the amazing musicians on there.)

Just the quintet (Dr, Bs. Gt, Tb, Tnr) was recorded live. This song (and most of the other stuff on the album) was written to work as both a quintet and as a big band chart.

[ttf_davdud101]

I've finally been able to get into "serious" brass recording - I've got my 8-channel interface set up with a stereo pair in the back of the room and a single, close mic up front.

But someone on another forum recommended that I ought to try this method, but I feel like it'd be overkill when working with 6 - 9 different brass parts (2 or 3 groups), as I'd end up with double as many tracks AND have to make a sort of decent-enough "room mix" for reverb. Doesn't seem like the best idea, IMO.

[ttf_Exzaclee]

do you have access to a ribbon mic? How about an omni directional?

If you have good room to record in these might be worthwhile options to try out. ask around and see if anyone you know has something.

[ttf_davdud101]

Quote from: Exzaclee on Feb 05, 2017, 07:03AMdo you have access to a ribbon mic? How about an omni directional?

If you have good room to record in these might be worthwhile options to try out. ask around and see if anyone you know has something.

I've got no ribbons at the moment, and all the decent-ish ones I've looked into are quite expensive. BUt I've also found that the ribbon sound feels a bit too muffled, perhaps, or not so clear/bright as I'd like. That's something I've always wondered about, as ribbons seem to be hailed as sort of the "end all, be all" of brass recording, but I've not been able to make myself particularly a fan.

I've got 3 *decent* MXL condensors, an SM58 clone (EV Co9), and an SM48 (sounds horrible! no clue what to use it on). I've found that the cheaper condensors I've got (a pair of MXL Tempoes) seem to do a good job of capturing a pretty natural, clear sound for trumpet while rolling off the high end enough that they make the horn sound nice without being overly sharp. They've got a little too much rolloff in the highs for trombone, I think a somewhat brighter, edgier mic gets a more open sound on an already sort of muffle-toned instrument.

I'll see if I can get in touch with anyone to try out some ribbons. I know a couple of guys who own a startup recording studio - though they're more into the metal scene. Not quite sure they'd even own ribbons. Worth a check!

[ttf_Exzaclee]

Ribbons need a good preamp. They're dynamic microphones and like any other dynamic, you need a good strong signal to get the best out of it. There are some ribbons that take phantom power, but most don't. Without a good preamp, you'll get pretty dull recordings out of ribbons.

The ribbons I've used tend to be warmer sounding - of course this translates to overly dark and muddy or noisy with a less than stellar preamp.

You can also use EQ to get a little more brightness out of your recording - roll off the lows a bit in the higher parts and boost the highs  to get more air in the sound.

[ttf_Exzaclee]

Ribbons need a good preamp. They're dynamic microphones and like any other dynamic, you need a good strong signal to get the best out of it. There are some ribbons that take phantom power, but most don't. Without a good preamp, you'll get pretty dull recordings out of ribbons.

The ribbons I've used tend to be warmer sounding - of course this translates to overly dark and muddy or noisy with a less than stellar preamp.

You can also use EQ to get a little more brightness out of your recording - roll off the lows a bit in the higher parts and boost the highs  to get more air in the sound.