i'll post some clips in the next few days, but i wanted to say i very
impressed with the dpa imk4061 mic. I got this mic to record my
classical guitar live. I do a sort of Charlie Byrd Trio thing, with
drums and upright bass, and of course we don't play loud, but there's
nothing acoustically natural about a trio with drums, bass and
classical guitar. you have to manufacture the performance. the
amplifier for the guitar is strictly for a live performance but we all
know that doesn't sound like a guitar and so you can't record a group
like this the same way you'd record say a piano trio (where all the
members are acoustically loud enough you can just use a stereo pair
and spots, etc.... if you did that you'd hear guitar amp and no
acoustic guitar. yechhhh. The problem I've always had with using a
spot on the guitar (even schoeps mk41) is WAY too much ambient sound,
mostly because we're playing so close together. lots of bass and lots
of cymbals in the guitar mic. no good, because you get a smeary,
phasey sound on the cymbals coming through so many spots, and the
guitar gets lost and drowned.
SO.... i mounted this mic inside the soundhole, directly underneath
the strings. It's an omni mic. I cannot believe how natural it
sounds- I mean, it's the inside of my guitar, how good can it be? but
it's really good. not like a nice stereo pair in a quiet room, but
still a very good sound. and the isolation is amazing. it's almost
all guitar in that mic with just a very little of the other stuff, but
the other stuff is in the background behind the guitar. It's such a
good and isolated sound i don't have to use the pickup track at all
(hooray!). i'm sure a countryman, et al, would be just as proficient
in this case as well.
on another note, i recorded my group myself, and i'm pissed off at the
foh guy. I got a lightpipe feed off their pm5d console into my pro
tools laptop rig. we set all the gains during setup/soundcheck. it
was fine. there's really no reason to even have foh at this gig- it's
a small room, but they tend to run a little guitar di and a little
bass di through the foh. and a talk mic. drum mics and guitar and
bass mics are strictly for the recording and are not going to foh.
I tested before the gig and am 100% the console was set up properly in
that the feed to my laptop was pre fader. so foh shouldn't affect it
at all, ok? so WHY THE **** does he engage pads and adjust channel
gains in the middle of my live recording. in the middle of a song.
lots of times. the signal is nowhere near clipping and yet all of a
sudden my guitar loses about 10 db and then in an instant jumps back
up and then down and then up. and it sounds just like twisting a knob
a little bit. he padded the overhead mics 20db right in the middle of
a drum break and did the same thing to the bass mic during the second
chorus of one of the tunes. and seemed to randomly adjust the guitar
mic (remember that fader should be all the way down and he shouldn't
be touching ANY of that channel).
he wasn't paid as recording engineer. so i can't go kill him. he
works for the hall as foh guy and they let take a feed off the board.
his boss is the production manager and configured the board for my
show and instructed him on what to do. meaning don't touch anything.
all i asked was that he periodically look at my laptop and see that
it's still running, and if not, start it up again.
there's really no excuse for him to have touched the gains. in the
middle of the gig. it was set properly originally with enough
headroom. i have waveforms to prove it. so i'm really pissed off but
there's nothing i can do except time wasting pro tools gain surgery.
not fun. it it all happened on the tunes in which i played the best
too.
rant off.
Nate
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