Current Topics

Alright, I was given a Shure SM 61 by my stepfather who is a professional musician and retired college music director. I have a live stream video podcast from my home studio. I run my audio through a Rodecaster Pro and I use Sterling SP 150 SMK condenser mics, of which I have three. I'm not well versed in audio. when I started the show, I had a producer who assured me I didn't need to learn any of the production or post. Well, he went through aa divorce and began taking two weeks to finish post, so I told him to get lost and decided to figure out how to live stream.

I've got a recording to do in a church on Saturday - it's a public event, and I'm going to record it for them. Not a church I have been to before, so I'm going to put up a heavy duty stand centre and am thinking maybe a chance to try out some more microphone experiments. As I think I can get up quite high I might be able to rig a pair of the 414s, in fig-8 for a Blumlein stereo pair and squeeze in M/S - with the ribbon I didn't destroy the other day and maybe the U87? I've not tried M/S with it, but I think I can make the 4 mics fit in the right places with a bit of 'bracketry'.

There don't seem many videos on this subject, so I thought I'd make one. In other videos, some of the differences between microphones, and even microphones of radically different prices, was actually quite subtle. To be honest, I usually have a goto mic for recording double basses - an AKG 414, so in this video I deliberately looked for alternatives. Before the audio, I've discussed some of the features of double basses that can help or hinder you once you know them.

I actually got a surprise with the mics I chose. The list was:

Very cool history on Sam Phillips / Elvis' sound and slap back echo. I've always wondered what Ampex 350 was about. 

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.