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  #1  
Old 03-26-2018, 09:00 AM
buzzardwhiskey buzzardwhiskey is offline
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Default 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!
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Old 03-26-2018, 12:21 PM
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ChuckS ChuckS is offline
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Originally Posted by buzzardwhiskey View Post
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!
I don't understand why you need all those headphones; I'm assuming they are for each member of the choir but could you please explain how they are intended to be used / why they are needed?

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.
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Last edited by ChuckS; 03-26-2018 at 12:30 PM.
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Old 03-26-2018, 12:49 PM
buzzardwhiskey buzzardwhiskey is offline
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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!
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Old 03-26-2018, 01:04 PM
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Originally Posted by buzzardwhiskey View Post
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!
How about if you used 4 sets of earbuds instead of headphones, with the prerecorded stuff being output in mono. Each set of earbuds could be shared by 2 choir members; each choir member could have an earbud in one ear and their other ear could hear the choir as they sang.

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.
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Old 03-26-2018, 10:23 PM
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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.
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Old 03-27-2018, 09:22 AM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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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.
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Old 03-30-2018, 09:29 AM
DupleMeter DupleMeter is offline
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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
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