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Jazz Quartet living-room recording
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Quartet is Piano, bass (upright), drums, tenor sax
Living room is 32'L x 13'W x 8'H with a hardwood floor. It's untreated, but
I have about fifteen 4" thick fiberglass panels I'm going to drag in from my
listening room. Don't think I'm going to be able to get any of these on the
ceiling (drilling holes isn't an option) so I will probably have to lay some
on the floor around the instruments in addition to the trapping the corners
and propping some up against the walls.
Question is, for a room this size am I likely going to be better off going
with a stereo pair recording or individual micing? For jazz I've typically
been doing a stereo pair (with the c42s), but I've always been working in a
larger room where the space is a somewhat desireable thing to capture.
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Depends on the sound that you are trying to get, and on how good the
overall sound of the room is.
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My mic closet is as follows:
2x Josephson C-42
1x AKG 451 w/ CK1
2x Marshall 603s
2x SM57
1x Beta 52A
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If I were you, I'd throw up a good stereo pair on the whole room, using
those Josephsons. Move them around until you're happy. Spot the piano
and the sax. Is the bass a guitar or a fiddle?
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I find the josephsons invariably thin in the low end. If they're my
ambients, I'd be tempted to spot the bass, or at least take a direct from
it. I've never DI'd an upright before, is it generally appropriate for jazz?
Is it going to sound strange having the majority of the bass signal being
DI, as I expect it would be if the c42s were the ambients?
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How the DI sounds is going to depend on what the DI is. If it's the
Fishman or Barcus-Berries kind, then yeah, you'll need to EQ the hell
out of it to get it to sit in the region of an acoustic bass sound. But
if it's a David Gage Realist you might not have to mess with it, and
taken in context it might not even sound like "DI'd bass" at all.
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For the piano... if I'm using the josephsons elsewhere I'm gonna need a
second decent stereo pair (the 603s aren't bad as overheads but they don't
cut it in the piano). Anything you can recommend that I shouldn't have too
much trouble finding (Schoeps and DPA aren't so common here)? It's a bright
yamaha, so something without a lot of presence would be ideal.
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A place near me carries AKG C480B w/CK61... are these worth trying?
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If I use individual micing I'll probably rent a couple large diaphragm mics
for the bass & sax. AKG 414s probably.
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I'd throw an RE-20 on them instead.
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I have 8 channels to record with (obvious choice is 2 for piano, 1 for bass,
1 for sax, 2 overheads, 1 snare, 1 kick)
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Get a good ambient pair, then throw 2 spots on the piano, one on the bass
and one on the sax. You won't need to spot drums at all. You probably
won't need the spot on the sax at all. You'll want the spots on the piano
if you decide the piano needs to be a brighter jazz kind of sound, and
you may decide you want the bass feed to balance the bass out. But your
goal is to try and rely on the ambient mikes for the sound of the group
and bring the spots in to compensate for things.
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