#1
|
|||
|
|||
Choir recording - 4 and 4?
I will be recording an eight child choir mid-April using an ORTF pair of Shure SM137's. My set-up currently only supports 4 headphones, so I'm thinking about splitting the kids into a first and second group.
Can anyone with more experience give me any tips or gotcha's to watch out for? Thank you!
__________________
Website: http://www.buzzardwhiskey.com |
#2
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Also, for such a small choir you probably don't need 2 microphones unless you need/want a stereo recording for some reason. If you arrange the choir in 2 or 3 rows, on risers/steps, a single microphone may provide a better balance than 2 microphones.
__________________
Chuck 2012 Carruth 12-fret 000 in Pernambuco and Adi 2010 Poling Sierra in Cuban Mahogany and Lutz 2015 Posch 13-fret 00 in Indian Rosewood and Adi Last edited by ChuckS; 03-26-2018 at 12:30 PM. |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
Thank you for your interest. I need to figure out a way that the choir can hear the music and drums which have already been recorded.
I will consider recording with a single mic. Thank you!
__________________
Website: http://www.buzzardwhiskey.com |
#4
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Shure has quite a few guidelines on-line for recording choirs. They cover things like choir arrangement, how many mics, mic type, mic location, etc. You might want to locate/arrange the choir members to get their best balance of voices; use arrangement of choir members instead of placement of microphones for initial balancing. If you end up arranging the choir in 2-3 rows you might want to have the mic(s) back about 3' from the first row, 3' higher than the singers in the top/back row, and angled down toward the singers in the top/back row.
__________________
Chuck 2012 Carruth 12-fret 000 in Pernambuco and Adi 2010 Poling Sierra in Cuban Mahogany and Lutz 2015 Posch 13-fret 00 in Indian Rosewood and Adi |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
I have done exactly the same thing with about 12 kids, but didn't have any headphone options. So I (quietly) played the backing tracks through a monitor speaker well behind the mics, so they could hear it a bit, and had phones for myself to make sure I was conducting them in time.
There was bleed-through, of course, but once the guitar and some string padding was added, it was just fine. You can hear the final result here This was done pretty cheaply; a couple of Behringer B-1 mics and Audacity, which was all I had at the time. The solo vocal counter-melody was actually added a couple of years later. |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
The speaker approach should work fine, and it's less disorienting for the kids. Also, a jumble of wires and 8 littles sounds like a bad combo.
There's video somewhere of Pink Floyd tracking those kids who don't need no education. They didn't seem to need no headphones, neither. |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
I would just use speakers unless you have enough cans for everyone.
The one extra step I would take is to record one pass of just the music bleed. So, once you've gotten your takes, have the choir stand there for one last take...but they don't sing. Just record the playback. Then you can add that into your DAW and invert the phase. That should cancel out just the monitor bleed (because it's consistent to the 2 takes) leaving a nice clean vocal take. Or if you have something like iZotope RX there's a nifty feature to remove headphone bleed. That would work too. Just keep the playback as low as it can be while still loud enough for the kids to stay synced. HTH
__________________
-Steve 1927 Martin 00-21 1986 Fender Strat 1987 Ibanez RG560 1988 Fender Fretless J Bass 1991 Washburn HB-35s 1995 Taylor 812ce 1996 Taylor 510c (custom) 1996 Taylor 422-R (Limited Edition) 1997 Taylor 810-WMB (Limited Edition) 1998 Taylor 912c (Custom) 2019 Fender Tele |