Need help recoding a flute and a guitar

A

Andrea189

Well-known member
I need some advice on how to record a flute solo playing a Bach sonata.

I have an AKG CK 91 mic and I will be recording to a Mix Pre 6. I will be using a room with sound absorbing walls.

Is the mic good enough? Where is it best placed?

Thank you for your help!

Andreas
 
Andrea189 said:
I need some advice on how to record a flute solo playing a Bach sonata.
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You'll get more answers and better answers asking on a music recording forum like the Gearslutz Acoustic Music and Location Recording forum.

That said, most people are going to suggest you record in stereo. In an unknown room, a good first guess is often an ORTF pair of cardioids. If you're recording an a nice sounding acoustic like a small to medium sized preformance hall, you might want to use a AB spaced pair of omnis instead. They'll do a better job of capturing the sound of the space and the airiness of the flute.

For flute, I'd want to start about 1.5 to 2 meters away. Close micing a flute is usually less than successful even for people with plenty of experience.

If you have any control of the room at all, go for a small to medium sized performance hall. Else, a medium sized stone church will work for baroque flute. I would try to avoid recording studios and other small dead rooms. It's far easier to record in a good acoustic in the first place. Otherwise you're faced with the dubious task of trying to create a convincing sense of space in post using artificial reverb which is expensive, time consuming, and really subtle, which is why it usually sounds fake (because it is fake).
 
IronFilm said:
Sure. Just do it.
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Well that helps a lot ;~)

The mic should be fine. Where you place it depends a lot on what you want it to sound like.

A flute is almost a pure sine wave. Very few overtones. But you do have breath sounds and fingering sounds.

SO if you want a purer sound you are probably aiming the mic at the end away from the player. In front a bit head on and you should pick up some of the fingering. Any position the includes some of the mouthpiece and you will get more of the blowing sound.

From what I have seen done the standard position is closer to the mouth piece and sometimes pointed a bit along the axis to pick up more fingering. It is also often up and aimed downward, probably to help keep the blowing from hitting the mic more than anything else.

I would play around with placement till you get the sound you want.
 
A dead room would be better than a small live room, but as Bruce stated, a decent reverb is expensive to simulate a hall. And yes, close mic'ing flute (and/or guitar) ain't a job for those not experienced in recording acoustic instruments.
 
Your title says flute and guitar, but you only mention the flute in your message. I think it would be very difficult to balance both instruments with only one microphone (and certainly you're not going to be getting stereo). The AKG CK91 (well technically, it becomes a C391 when mated to the power module) is a well respected acoustic instrument mic and should give you no problems.
 
Thank you all for your great feedback!

As I understand the best option would be to find a medium sized room with good acoustics and record in stereo.

I am not sure I can get that optimal situation and I probably have to use a 3 meter by 3 room with sound absorbing walls, in this case I will try and use the cardioid not too close to the instrument.
 
Greg Smith said:
Your title says flute and guitar, but you only mention the flute in your message. I think it would be very difficult to balance both instruments with only one microphone (and certainly you're not going to be getting stereo). The AKG CK91 (well technically, it becomes a C391 when mated to the power module) is a well respected acoustic instrument mic and should give you no problems.
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Yes you are right, I might try and record also a sonata for flute and harpsichord with a guitar instead of an harpsichord. If I do that I will probably try and record the two instruments in two separate rooms with the musicians listening to each other through headphones
 
I'm mid-way through a project involving lots of Diploma standard flute pieces. Some are incredibly fast and furious, and very tricky to play. Reinecke, Blavet and Rutter come to mind as er, challenging pieces.

What are you recording it for? That's very important. It will impact on how you approach the entire thing. It's well worth looking on youtube - most of the popular works, and quite a few of the stranger ones, are there.

If you are doing it for kind of posterity, and mistakes don't matter - then that makes life easier. In my recordings, early on we realised that two people effectively make the playing 4 times harder, in terms of mistakes. You only have one mic, but it is a decent one. I would strongly recommend that you cheat. Record the accompaniment properly and then get the flautist to play to that rather than the accompaniment as a live recording. Balance will be very awkward if you record both on one mic, and one of them will be off-mic, unless it's a distance away, and then your room sound, good or bad will intrude. You also must consider how you recover from mistakes. If either player makes a slip, you have to stop. Editing two people's contribution is never very good - but even just the flute our guitar will be hard. This style of music will also have very few natural breaks - so I recommend you find them, and record in sections. If they make a mistake, then they only have to re-create that section and you can edit them together. Easier on the accompaniment instrument. You work on this track until the musicians nod. Then you record the flute.

They are buggers to record for two reasons. They are cylindrical bore instruments, and they DO have overtones. Oboes and bassoons have a conical bore, with an open end. These instruments (like oboes, cor angles, saxophones etc have only even numbered harmonics, and this gives that rich tone we know well. Clarinets are almost cylindrical, so have a similar system to the flute, but flutes are stopped - the end is sealed, so both have ALL the harmonics in the series, but the stop at the end of the flute tube makes it perform differently to the clarinet. In the case of the flute, these harmonics also increase when the player plays louder - the top end expands drastically once they start giving it some wellie! (English slang for fff). The other reason they are hard to record is because the players move around an awful lot - Google James Galway, with his gold flute, and see how effervescent he gets when the pieces get faster. You cannot have a close mic position for this, and to a degree, the movement is integral to the demands of the piece, with the tonal shifts that result. You also need to take into consideration the fact that the origin of the sound from a flute moves as the pads go down - a C could 'emerge' from all of the open pads in one fingering, but only from a few near the lip plate - if you are miking the wrong place, close in - it sounds wrong. This is also why those clip on stage mics for live performance can sound very shrill - but they are fixed to the flute. This is another big problem. Flutes, especially older ones, make dreadful clacking noises, even when serviced properly. Some players, if you watch, hold their fingers above the keys and pads and when they press, they do it percussively. You will never het them to stop or even change this for a recording - and it's horrible. Again, more distant miking in a good room helps. Going in closer doesn't sound nice.

I'd recommend that you talk to them and see if you can persuade them to play to track. They might moan and say it's impossible, but the expense of a pianist for flute concerts is hugely expensive, and people like me produce accompaniment practice tracks - a kind of classical karaoke, so for practice they use a track, and then move to a real pianist nearer the concert date to minimise expense.

Find suitable places in the piece to stop. Once they get tired, the mistakes increase and you can waste so much time.

Each piece we record takes around a day. Half a day to get the piano (in my case) recorded, then same again for the flute. Some days, we don't get the flute finished at all. If they pick a simpler and easier to play piece your life will be better. If they want a mistake free recording with a contemporary clean and clear sound - this is a hard project to attempt. Today, my pianist phoned. he'd spotted a wrong note in one of the pieces. He wishes to fix it - which means a new session and lots of work.

Hopefully, yours will be more of a music diary of the event, and sound quality and a mistake free performance isn't the aim. if it is - best of luck. Here's a snippet of one of the rehearsal tracks that Bach aficionados have on the Diploma list. Not an easy piece for the accompanist, let alone the flautist!

js_bach_sonata_in_g_major_bmv525_mvt3

One mic sounds to me like a very difficult job to do well, and I actually agree with the reverb suggestion on a mono recording, it can work very well to thicken it up a bit, but the blend between your guitar and the flute will be very difficult to do well, and frankly, so much is in the hands of the musicians.
 
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Thank you for the great and detailed advice.

I am recording 3 sonatas to use in a documentary. About the two simultaneous recordings, I am getting a Line Audio CM3 mic for the guitar and I am thinking of placing the players in separate sound-proofed rooms with a glass window in between so that they can see each other and they can listen to the music through headphones. This was suggested by a friend who works as a sound recordist in films and TV series
 
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