Current Topics

Another video that came to me reading one of the many topics on the internet where people are almost paranoid about the fragility of ribbon mics and how you can so easily destroy them. I figured the science suggests such damage is highly unlikely, so I take my own ribbon - and I only own a single one - and deliberately connect it in place of an AKG 414. I did it as many people could do, using a mic that needs phantom power and then unplugging it and connecting the ribbon - finishing the video on that mic, happily working with 48V supplied to it.

Here's the reposted item on how you can record grand pianos - I'll explain what made me do it. It's quite common to record what I've always called 'natural acoustic' recordings. Solo singers of all kinds, or duos, small ensembles or choirs - often in really nice venues with great acoustics and it's the sort of thing that seems to encourage stereo recording techniques. We get excited by X/Y, rarely use A/B and more and then people explore Blumlein stereo and even M/S techniques. A few experiment with the spacing and the angles and discover ORTF and other clever systems.

We've been working on another video - the idea to talk about recording saxophones, but it became obvious that many people have never looked at saxophones that hard, so the video stretched a bit - the first section looks at how saxes actually work and how you should not do certain things, and also the kind of detective work you should do when you have somebody with a sax that needs recording.

My band has called it a day. Sadly, our bandleader is pretty ill and the prognosis is not good. I've been working hard on material we recorded over the past few years and I've managed to find enough tracks for 6 complete songs, which I'm going to put up on the usual platforms just so we remember the good times we all have. We've decided that we just don't want to do it any more and carrying on would just not work. It's been challenging because he can't re-record his keys or vocals any longer, so what we have is it.

Here is a good example of what over compressing drums sounds like.

Beautiful setup and performance but you can hear the compression attack and release is set to high.