Archive for December, 2009

El Guit is no doubt one of my favorite instruments to record. With a good guitar paired with a decent amplifier and “Yeah I’m in engineer bliss”. One of the many cool thing about today modern music business is the technology and how convenient things have gotten, with a modern amp you can get such clean level, we have a variety of easily adjustable tones, and with most modern amps, an assortment of wonderful flavors like tube saturation, overdrive, and compression. To top off all these great flavor is the,  bandwidth of a typical electric guitar track is perfectly suited to the frequency response of affordable dynamic microphones like the Shure SM57. Now this doesn’t mean that using the age old standard of miking a guitar amps by shoving a 57 against the grille is the best way to get El Guit to stand out in the track.

For most of the horns especially trumpets, trombones, flugelhorns, any of the brass I like large-diaphragm mics, and that’s because they do a great job of capturing the essence of brass, part of which is the sound of a musician pushing air through a mouthpiece, and their tongue and teeth are all part of the sound. All of those things play a big, important role in how it ultimately sounds. With a large-diaphragm, you can actually even hear them before the note comes out. You’ll hear them “phth” into the note, and I like that. I notice that when I use a small-capsule microphone, whether it’s some of the Earthworks DK25/R mics or even a Shure SM57, you miss something. The Neumann M 147, TLM 67, and U87 have always been my staples, and I also like the SE 5600 large-diaphragm. I like the 47 on the trombone, 8 to 12 inches from the trombone. I like the 87 and sometimes the 67 on a trumpet, 12 to 14 inches from the horn. I also like the 67 on a flugelhorn, 8 to 12 inches away.