Evergreen Singers - Sing for Women's Rights

:: Got a new recording up; actually, several new recordings. The Evergreen Singers wanted their performance pieces for the Winter quarter recorded, so I was more than happy to oblige. I wanted to try a few things I hadn't done in the past, so I tried three different mic'ing techniques.

First, for the full choir, I used a Decca tree configuration consisting of two U87's about eight feet apart pointing a few degrees foward (toward the choir) of perpendicular to the side walls and one AKG 414 about two feet in front of the other Neumanns. All three were in omni pattern and put about ten feet up. I feel that the success of this recording mainly came from that great height, allowing the voices to blend before they reached the mics. For the future, I would probably put the side mics in cardioid mode to enhance the stereo image even more; they caught a little too much of the entire room for my taste, but listen for yourself. The link is at the end of this post.

Second, I used our Avantone CK-40 for the small ensembles. This microphone is unique in that it has two separate diaphragms sending two discrete signals. Each diaphragm has an independent polar pattern selector switch; furthermore, the top diaphragm is rotatable up to 180º opposite the bottom diaphragm. I decided to put them both in bidirectional mode and rotate the top to 90º to achieve a Blumlein stereo configuration. I was pleased with the separation between the channels, but I'd like to get a little more of a center image from it. The performers were also pretty close to it, so if someone was louder than the others, it was very apparent. In the coming weeks, I'd like to play with some weird phase inversion, reverb, and other processing combinations to put those recordings in a 5.1 surround setting. Hear the Avantone on "Edmonds" and "March of the Women" after the jump.

Third, I mic'ed the piano with two KM84's in an XY pattern at the curve of the body. It's not as good as the sound I got in my recording of "Horsetown" by Centralia College, but I'll talk about that when I get around to uploading that song. As far as this particular piano goes though, I also had heard something about placing a pressure zone microphone underneath the piano to capture more of the bass frequencies. I probably didn't do it correctly because I ended up throwing out that track completely. Anyhow, to hear all nine songs, click the link below to visit the File Vault:

http://musicianator.web.officelive.com/default.aspx ::