brass and winds

[lee]

i just went looking under the "best of message board", and, yes, its has links for recording a glockenspiel, and a singing saw, but nothing on brass or winds. pshaw!..

ive been listening to "when i was cruel" and am obsessed with getting horns sounding like those on 15 petals.

im trying close micing and theres to much spit rattling in the mouthpeice (Coltrane on kinda blue), dont like it. im trying micing far away, and there goes the low mids. compression, not a clue...
does anyone working with horns and has some advice?

[cgarges]

Are you going out and standing in front of the horn and listening? If you are, does that stuff stil seem apparent? If the player's technique is such that their mouth noises are loud, that's really just got to be a part of the sound, much like an acoustic guitar with fret buzz is going to buzz when someone plays it. It's really difficult to remove that sort of thing without taking a bunch of the horn sound with it.

There are some tricks you can apply but you need to decide if the sacrifice in overall tone is worth it. Move around the horn and the player and listen for spots where the horn or the player's body is blocking the mouthpiece from where the mic would be. If the line of sight is blocked, the line of sound will be affected as well. This might reduce some of what you're hearing, but putting the mic in different spots will yield drastically different tonal results. Be prepared to spend a bit of time experimenting. There's a lot of give and take involved in getting a pleasing and natural sound from a saxophone. To me, it's one of the more difficult instruments to capture accurately.

Hope this helps.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[soundguy]

ribbon microphone.

dave

[The Real MC]

Sennheiser 441 is a favorite for horns. It is full range and is not as sensitive as a condenser so it won't pick up the extraneous noises.