I've done my first Decca Tree recording

In all the years I've been recording, Decca Trees have been a mystery to me. I've been at sessions where they were used and the amount of hardware up in the air was daunting, but with a bit of effort, I've done one - in a venue with less that wonderful acoustics, and the effort was worth it!

Not really our type of microphone, but worthy of a quick look, maybe?

A ribbon mic you can put on your lips and shout into without damage, or can even whisper into.

I posted recently about a job coming up where I was going to use a condenser mid mic, and a ribbon side mic, and useful piece of information emerged.

Here is the latest video on recording choirs, and follows on from the video from earlier this week where I talked about different stereo techniques.

Hello!

I recently got a Shure SM7b but I suspect it's defective. I've only recorded vocals for one song with it but felt there was something off with the sibilance so I analyzed it with Voxengo Span and noticed that there is a weird dip at 6500 Hz. It looks exactly like if there was an EQ with a very narrow bell with a pretty large decrease in dB at 6500 Hz.

This is an average measurement using Voxengo Span. The audio is completely dry, the SM7b set to flat (i.e. no bass roll off or presence boost).

It seemed sensible, before starting to do the video on recording choirs, to explain a little about the differing techniques you can use to record 'real' stereo - as in recording the placement of individual sound sources within a stereo soundfield. Quite different from our usual multitrack method of panning the various tracks to their proper location.

In the videos I have been producing, we've listened to a number of microphones and how they respond to voice and instruments, but for completeness, we'd not heard them on voices. I'd been working on a little job where I'm creating a stage track for a person I've worked with for years and I always send him the stems, and a guide vocal.

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.

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.

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.