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anonymous 2 January 2003

We are doing a small group -bluesy, with piano,standup and guitar(archtop). The problem has been trying to do justice to our singer. She is basically an alto, and still has a sweet top to go with a nice chest tone,but has very big dynamics. She's not a belter, but can get really loud when the spirit moves her. We have used our Neumann 193 through a dbx 386 and both a dbx 1066/1176ln blackface(basically all we have of any quality). This was recorded through a delta1010 at 24x44 into Cubase sx, edited and mastered to a demo with wavelab4. Most everything came out well, except the vocal. After getting the comp. down to a minimum(~3db), the voice was thin,(not in the room!) and had some disagreeable problems up high(not in the room). I wondered if some of you might share opinions about what might be a good combo to work towards. Some hereabouts like the avalon. Anyone?

thanks in advance
bub

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Sebatron Sun, 01/12/2003 - 18:45

bub,
i can slightly relate to it.
Once i had a similar situation -dynamic female vocals with a tendancy to 'thin out' in the top register.
A dynamic mic saved the day.
I tried different condensers all with the same result ,brittle intolerable tops.
So i grabbed my EV RE-20 (!!??) and lo-and-behold.
Just a little compression was all that was needed using a DBX-160 :)

anonymous Fri, 01/24/2003 - 09:35

I would go along with e-cue about the mics, if you have the cash. I never liked the 193; maybe on some kinds of percussion, but it's not a very musical sounding microphone to me. You will find a tube mic, even a cheap one, will bring out the chest tone that's missing in the vocal. If you do that, you might find the rest of your input chain is quite adequate. It took me along time to realize that if the signal going in doesn't make it, there is no amount of 'magic' boxes that can fix it. A lot less frustration and more cost effective, too.

Brian

anonymous Tue, 02/04/2003 - 02:40

Thank you for the ideas. My budget for this would be in the 5k range for a solution, and I could trade the 193 for maybe 1k (heh heh,that's in canuck bucks). We had a very very brief chance to try a 4060 through an Avalon,(it was already up for the standup) which sounded very creamy as compared to the gear I mentioned earlier, but this was a softish harmony bit, and so not much to go on. The objectionable 'stridency/glassy/glare/grunge' whatever, was really most apparent when the temperature was rising.
cheers

anonymous Tue, 02/04/2003 - 02:43

Thank you for the ideas. My budget for this would be in the 5k range for a solution, and I could trade the 193 for maybe 1k (heh heh,that's in canuck bucks). We had a very very brief chance to try a 4060 through an Avalon,(it was already up for the standup) which sounded very creamy as compared to the gear I mentioned earlier, but this was a softish harmony bit, and so not much to go on. The objectionable 'stridency/glassy/glare/grunge' whatever, was really most apparent when the temperature was rising.
cheers

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