Category Archives: Upright Bass

Recording the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square & Millennial Choirs and Orchestras with Royer

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Jason Graham, Recording and Broadcast Engineer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, explains how he uses ribbon mics when recording The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square (formerly Mormon Tabernacle Choir) and also The Millennial Choirs and Orchestras.

Preamplifier and placement information is included in the video. The songs featured in the video are included below in their entirety. 

Mics used:

SF-24V: Choir, Oipe Organ, Room
SF-2: Choir
SF-24: Sections
R-122V: Strings
R-121 Harp
dBooster: support Woodwind mics

Amazing Grace

Be Still My Soul

Bile Them Cabbage Down

Come, Come Ye Saints

Erlkonig

Fab Dupont / Will Knox

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Acoustic Guitar – SF-1
Violin – R-121
Banjo – SF-2
Standup Bass – R-122
Drum Overhead – SF-24
Drums, Tom-Toms – R-122
Drums, Kick – R-122V
Drums, Hi-Hat – R-121

Producer: Fab Dupont.  Engineer: Meredith McCandless

When our friend Fab Dupont set out to record singer/songwriter Will Knox’s album “The Matador And The Acrobat” with engineer Meredith McCandless, they decided to track the album entirely with Royer ribbons (except for a condenser on Will’s vocal and a dynamic on the snare). Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the recording process that Fab and company so kindly put together for us.

Fab-tn

 

Vocals & Guitar: Will Knox
Violin: Clayton Mathews
Banjo: Kyle James Houser
Standup Bass: Chris Anderson
Drums: Timur Yusef

Visit Fab’s website at www.fabulousfab.com. Visit Flux Studios at www.fluxstudios.net.

Puremix.net is an educational website featuring a wide assortment of videos on recording, mixing, mastering and much more. Puremix.net was created by Fab Dupont; his partners in Puremix now include Ben Lindell and Ryan West.

 

Ukrainian Radio and Television Orchestra

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Full Orchestra – SF-12 Stereo Ribbon

Engineer/Producer: Russell Dawkins
Recorded at the studios of the Ukrainian Radio/Television Orchestra, Kiev.

Recording chain: One SF-12 stereo ribbon microphone with 35-feet of Monster cable connected to a Studio Technologies mic pre, then 6-feet of Monster cable to an Apogee A/D converter, to coaxial cable to the digital ‘in’ on a portable DAT machine. No compression or reverb used.

This exceptional recording of a full orchestra was made on one SF-12 stereo ribbon microphone, positioned over the conductor’s head, at a distance that achieved a nice balance of the orchestra and hall ambience. We use this recording regularly in seminars, as it’s a wonderful example of the amazingly natural reproduction a high-quality ribbon microphone is capable of delivering. The off-axis response is perfect, transients are natural with no overshoot or ringing, and the flat frequency response captures the full range of the orchestra with no peaks or dips anywhere throughout the frequency range.

Sergei Prokofiev – “Romeo and Juliet, Suite No. 2”

 

 
Sergei Prokofiev – “Romeo and Juliet, Suite No. 2” excerpt 2

Foghorn Stringband

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Bluegrass Band – SF-24
Acoustic Guitar – SF-24
Fiddle – SF-24
Mandolin – SF-24
Standup Bass – SF-24

Recording Engineer: Stephen Schauer

Recording Chain: See Recording Notes below

Foghorn Stringband playing live at Old Style Guitar Shop, presented by The Bluegrass Situation. Great performance of the old Stanley Brothers tune We’re Going to Paint the Town and Kennesaw Mountain Rag. Caleb Klauder on mandolin, Sammy Lind on fiddle, Nadine Landry on bass, and Reeb Willms on guitar.

 

foghorn-strings

Recording Notes from engineer Stephen Schauer:

I had a wonderful opportunity to shoot and record a little video of Foghorn Stringband for Ed Helm’s traditional music website, The Bluegrass Situation (www.thebluegrasssituation.com). This kind of music is close to my heart, so it was a blast to get this time with such an amazing and talented group of folks.

We had an hour with the band and a crew of just 3, so I had to operate a camera AND run sound. The audio setup had to be fast and simple with great fidelity AND not clutter the frame. Using a Royer SF-24 in the center of the band allowed them to play in a traditional way – gathered around a single mic as was done for the last hundred years. It allowed them to huddle up close, and a great performance that you can only get when the band can really hear themselves and play off each other’s energy. The sonic character of the mic was a great complement to voices and the strings.

Regarding the technical side, we kept it simple so I didn’t need to do much fancy footwork in the edit and mix. I had the SF-24 front and center and tried to contain the performers within the front lobes of the figure 8. The room was tiny, but thankfully it was trapezoidal so there were fewer standing resonant tones in the room. The SF-24 is 9-% of what you hear in the recordings.

I panned out the Royer 60% left and right until the soundstage felt like it matched the visual, I put a little notch in the EQ around the lead singer’s voice to help bring it forward, and rolled off the bass of the SF-24 with a mellow high pass curve set at around 70hz (to clean up the room tone and leave space for a close mic I had on the bass, which was panned to match her position).

I had an AKG 451EB on the floor close to the bass, with a low pass filter set for 700 Hz, and a Beyerdynamic MC834 in the adjacent guitar showroom for nice real room ambience that I could mix in later if needed, rather than relying on reverb plug-ins. The MC834 had a high pass filter set at 500 Hz, and the mic was mixed back about 5 dB.

On the master, I pushed up the 300-1200hz about 1 dB, used a little preset compression that sounded good, added a tiny bit of reverb, and used a limiter with about 2db threshold to get the overall levels up for the video.

I recorded directly into a Tascam HS-p82 with no outboard preamps and mixed it all in Reaper with the stock plug-ins, on my laptop.

-Stephen Schauer

 

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Allen Toussaint – Full Mix and Isolated Tracks

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Piano – SF-24
Upright Bass – R-122V

Recorded and mixed by Kevin Killen. Producer, Joe Henry.
Recorded at Avatar Studios, New York, NY.

Recording Chain:
Piano – SF-24 positioned at the edge of the piano lid, center of the piano. SF-24 into Neve 8088 console preamps. 1 dB boost at 16K using Millennia NSEQ-2 stereo equalizer in tube setting. Recorded to ProTools.
Upright Bass – R-122V into Neve 8088 console preamp. 1/2 dB boost at 12K using a Pultec EQP-1A, and 1 dB compression. Recorded to ProTools.

“That’s My Home” (Sydney Robin)

a) Full Mix

 
 

b) Isolated Piano: SF-24 on piano


 
 

c) Isolated Upright Bass: R-122V on upright bass