No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater... than recording strings

[pucho812]

As part of the sessions this weekend, I had a string quartet in on a couple of songs with an artist.

The band was prepared. But I found out that as part of our sessions we would be adding strings on a couple of songs. We had a full quartet in the studio. Boy what fun it was. i haven't had a string date in ages.

the strings were captured with a combo of diy mics and non diy mics alike. awesome stuff.

 

[pucho812]

So for the setup on this…
We started with basic placement of where the quartet would be in the room. Basically said they will work here and arranged them in a half circle as a quartet is usually set up. Left to right: violin 1, violin 2, viola, cello.
from there we placed our spot mics which were 3 x km86’s for the violins and viola. It’s my favorite violin and viola mic. It just sounds amazing. On the cello we had an rca 77 in unidirectional.
For overheads we used a 7.1 surround sound mic using the left, right, left surround, and right Surround. The holophone h2. What a wonder of kit. We got this as a used mic for next to nothing from a post production house and are still exploring all it has to offer. Lastly we did a blumlein setup for rooms using custom built m-49 clones. We ended up with 10 tracks capturing the quartet that all sound amazing and can blend into a stereo pair that just has everything you want.

 

[fazer]

Awesome! I loved any time I had the privilege of recording strings. Real is always the best. The players always seem to make you sound like you know what your doing -when the arrangement is there. It’s a beautiful thing. I’m envious.

 

[Spiritworks]

We had a Quartet in a few months ago consisting of two violins, cello and upright bass. We used an AEA R-88 placed above and behind the Conductor's head which worked out very nicely. They were total Pros and were actually having fun. I had a tear in my eye as I watched the proceedings, not only because of how beautiful it sounded but because the studio was living and breathing like it should be.

 

[pucho812]

We had a Quartet in a few months ago consisting of two violins, cello and upright bass. We used an AEA R-88 placed above and behind the Conductor's head which worked out very nicely. They were total Pros and were actually having fun. I had a tear in my eye as I watched the proceedings, not only because of how beautiful it sounded but because the studio was living and breathing like it should be.

Yeah. This was a good teaching lesson for the second engineer. He has never recorded strings before. As I explained we do spot mics and a combo of room and overheads. Common thing to do, but in the end we will just use the overheads and maybe room as the strings tend to do a good job of balancing themselves. The spot mics are there in case we need to reinforce anything. Our studio works really well and is a good ambient space without being too much or too little, it's not dead, it's live but not overly live. This was our first string session at this location and boy was it great.

 

[midwayfair]

Hmmmm.
thinking ....

... than central air on a g string?