Location Recording

by Paul Stubblebine (Published by Mix Magazine)

Although I spend most of my days in the mastering lab working on recordings from a very wide range of musical styles, I also do a lot of location recording of acoustic music, from classical to bluegrass and beyond. In this article I am going to go through the steps I followed in selecting a microphone technique for a recent recording. One thing I like about location recording is that each job is a whole new set of challenges. Follow along as I try to guide you through the choices I made and why.

It starts, of course, with the music. The group was the Arcadian Academy, directed by Nicholas McGegan (who also plays harpsichord), with soprano Christine Brandes. It was produced by David Bowles for Swineshead Productions, and should be out about the time this article appears. They had selected a number of Scarlatti sonatas. The instrumentation is harpsichord, two baroque violins, viola da gamba, and archlute (doubling on theorbo.)

There are a couple of implications that come up immediately: first of course is that this will be an acoustic recording. By that I don't just mean acoustic instruments. I mean that these instruments (including the voice) play the acoustic of the room in which the music is made, and the interaction of instruments with the room is part of what we intended to capture. This music is not made to be heard in a dry studio, nor in a symphony hall. It is heard best in a small concert hall. Thus one of my goals was to have the recording present a believable perspective of a small group performing together in a beautiful sounding, and appropriately sized, concert hall. I would like to end up with a seamless stereo image, with the players arranged naturally within it.

The performers are all leading exponents of the Early Music/Authentic Instrument/Historically Informed Performance movement. If I may oversimplify an entire movement in music in order to fit it into one sentence: A great deal of scholarship has been applied to understanding the way this early music would have been heard by its original audiences, including performance technique and the way the instruments are built, adjusted, tuned, etc. The implication for the recordist is this: since these people go to a lot of extra trouble to get their instruments to sound the way they do, I had better make sure they sound that way on the recording.

Of course lots of musicians who play modern instruments also care about the sound they produce, and I don't mean to say otherwise. I'm just saying that in this case, the sound of the instruments is a deliberate part of the musical statement, and one the recordist cannot ignore.

The ideal of literal recreation of the sound of the performance is not something even worth discussing unless you can control the entire playback system as well as the recording. Yet those of us who make recordings for the real world also want our recordings to embody more than just the notes played in the right order. We want to convey as much of the expressiveness of the musicians as we possibly can. Since the timbres of the instruments are a part of that musical expression, one of my goals for this recording was that it would, if not literally recreate the timbres, at least tell the truth about them in a wide variety of listening rooms. The two violinists, Elizabeth Blumenstock and Lisa Weiss, sound distinctly different. Not only do their instruments differ, but the tone of course begins with the musician's fingers, so it's no surprise that they don't sound identical. I would hope that the listener could easily hear the tone of each. When David Tayler switches from archlute to theorbo, it should sound like a theorbo--I assume each of you is intimately familiar with the sound of a theorbo. Also, since I must confess some Audiophile leanings, I hoped that the recording would just sound more and more realistic the better the playback system.

One other consideration high on my list was to record the sound of the singer particularly well. A soprano voice is not the easiest thing to capture, and I've heard many pieces of gear show their weaknesses when trying. I just hate it when a soprano sounds steely or screechy in her upper register. Luckily Christine Brandes has a beautifully smooth, almost creamy, vocal sound. I just felt that I wanted to be on guard so that nothing about my recording technique would compromise her sound.

The producer and I agreed on the hall in which to do this recording: the chapel of St. Vincent School in San Rafael. We have both worked in this room a number of times, and know that it is capable of sounding quite beautiful. It is also capable of overpowering the music if you aren't careful. It has "a ton" of room sound, and careful mic technique would be needed to get the right balance.

In addition to the specific considerations just mentioned, there is one consideration I always have in mind in my recording efforts: I want it to sound good. Pardon me if that sounds obtuse. I'm just saying that if I made a recording that achieved all those specific objectives but didn't make me forget I was listening to a recording, that didn't get out of the way and invite me deeply into the music, that didn't tickle some pleasure center within me, then it would not be a successful recording for me. And I've made enough unsuccesful recordings to know one when I hear one.

So with all those different factors to balance, what mic technique shall we use? Of course we have in our engineer's toolkit a number of recognized stereo mic techniques: Blumlein, M-S, X-Y, ORTF, AB, and more. We have also used the recognized techniques as starting points and improvised off of them in the past.

In this case my desire to get a certain sound on the voice led me to consider a three mic stereo technique. With the vocalist centered in front of the group, any two-mic coincident or near-coincident technique would have meant my vocal pickup would have been the sum of two mics' off-axis output. I wanted one mic, on axis, for the primary vocal pickup. This would also allow me to choose a microphone specifically for its compatibility with her voice. I didn't want to use a three-spaced-omnis approach, however, because it would have yielded too diffuse an image, and given problems with the balance of direct and hall pickup in this very reverberant room. I decided on something that is reminiscent of the Decca tree (Purists, save your postage. I didn't say this is an exact Decca tree-just that I was thinking of that as a base for improvisation.) We would start with picking the center mic, and build it from there.

I brought a half-dozen mics to try in the center position. All were top quality mics, well-respected by professional recordists worldwide. And as anyone experienced with microphones would expect, they all sounded different. We tried them all, and the one we agreed sounded the best for her voice in this room was a Beyer ribbon mic. It had the smoothness we wanted, plus good resolution, and enough headroom to handle a soprano's peaks. Of course its low output meant I needed a good sounding, high gain, low noise mic preamp, but that's another article.

The Beyer is a bi-directional mic (figure 8, in other words.) This meant that its rear lobe would be picking up plenty of room sound, so I leaned towards a cardioid pattern for my two side mics. Remember, balance of direct and hall pickup was one of the areas I knew I'd have to be careful about if I didn't want the room to dominate the recording. So for pattern control, plus truthful timbre, high resolution, inviting sound quality overall, etc. I chose a pair of Klaus-modified Neumann U87's, in cardioid mode. It just took some experimentation with placement until I heard the balance of the instruments we were looking for, the right amount of room, and a seamless stereo image. They wound up in a shallow triangle, with the side mics each about two feet off center, with the center mic about a foot ahead of the plane of the other two. All of the mics were at a height of about five feet off the floor, and a coupla feet away from the nearest musician. You might wonder whether two cardioid condensor mics and a bi-directional ribbon could blend into a unified sound. Well, I found positions for them so that they blended well enough to suit me--very well indeed, in my view. If I hadn't been able to get that blend, I would have kept trying other things until I did get it.

After that, we were left with a couple of reflections that seemed to poke out in slightly rude ways, so we set about damping them. Luckily there happened to be some Medieval looking banners on poles-just perfect for this kind of music-that we placed in strategic spots to kill the problem reflections, and we were ready to roll tape.

If this description makes it sound at all as though it would be your cup of tea, I highly recommend that you pick up the CD. The music is absolutely gorgeous. And if you do, then you can decide for yourself whether the recording technique does it justice.