At 5:47 PM +0000 2/1/09, joel ryan wrote:
>Justin
>I'm someone who has interest in both music and ambient recording and find =
this
>intrusion of a musical question to be very interesting. When I
>started experimenting with
>ambient nature recording, I asked the maker of the Telingas about a
>dual use of his mics
>and he was very clear that in his opinion they were not suited for music.
>
>The real issue may be the kind of sonic perspective you are looking
>for, and this may or
>may not mean you need the super silent type of mic's necessitated by
>nature recording.
>A Shakuhachi has a very wide dynamic range but to get a sense of its
>unique rich sound
you have to be close to the microphone. This means that the self
noise of something like
musically beautiful 4060 DPAs might not be so much of a problem.
DPA's are quite
sensitive which significantly decreases the threshold of their
moderate noise and they can
handle quite high levels. Only a super-loud playback would raise the
electronic noise to
the foreground.
I use 4061's for Violin, Erhu and other bowed strings because they
are a bit less
sensitive than 4060's and can handle the extreme levels of a violin
at a distance of 10
cm or so. Many people have made very good ambient recordings with the
small DPA's.
and a well-known commercial surround-sound microphone is in fact made
up of these
same elements. Mics useful for ambient recording have the advantage
that they don't
have to answer to our very very exacting ear for familiar musical sounds.
Of course you might want to take a more distant view point in which
case very quiet
ambient mic's could work as they do to place intense bird sounds in a
deep transparent
sound image.
I would make some tests with DPA's (or what ever mics you can borrow) to ge=
t a
practical sense of how much noise you would be dealing with for the
sound you want.
An incremental approach is always better if you can return to your
source. Some find the
lack of reverberation in outdoor recordings afford a very special
musical experience, but
you have to expect a radically different perspective from that of the
chamber hall. The
best advice for music as for all recording is experiment vigorously
with where you place
the microphones.
The ideal sound unfortunately may require a multiple microphone
recording to capture
both the qualities of the instrument and the ambience but this may be
for a later stage
>of your obsession.
>
>Joel Ryan
>Steim Amsterdam & Institute of Sonology The Hague
>
Hi Joel--
Thanks for the excellent, comprehensive picture. I also suggested to
Justin, off list, that its probably time to get into the field and
try out his perceptions and gain experiences to build-upon.
I think I appreciate the enhancements you are referring to when you
suggest that,
>A Shakuhachi has a very wide dynamic range but to get a sense of its
>unique rich sound
>you have to be close to the microphone.
but, I also think that there are qualities equally as rich to be
mined through distant micing and that this appreciation is mostly
independent of sound source. Perhaps it is a "documentation" attitude
towards communicative performances in actual spaces that is somewhat
uniquely shared on this list. Rob D.
--
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