AA2 - Week 5 - Wind Recording.

John and I teamed up again to record a tuba and french horn duet, namely Jess and Liz. We had first considered using a shure SM56 kick drum mic on the tuba, however after hearing the instrument live it was obvious it needed a high clarity microphone. We finished up with an AKG-C414BULS at the bell of the tuba, with a Neumann KM84 placed higher above and a Neumann U87 placed near the mouthpiece (with a popper stoppper). This positioning worked well for the french horn as well, so we matched each mic to each part of the instruments, resulting in an even tone between the two in the recording. The room mic is a Neumann U87 placed behind the students, underneath a good arrangement of sound dispersers on the ceiling. Several obstacles John and I encountered- The french horn makes a distorted sound when it is filling up with 'musician juice', the tuba's keys have a fairly loud mechanism and a french horn player uses their hand in the bell to change the tone and quite drastically change the volume. After a couple warm ups Jess and Liz played the Muppets theme song, which would (unknowingly) end up in this blog entry. There is something quite comical about the sound of a pair of classical horns, perhaps silent movies have something to do with it.

With Room Mic

With Neumann U87s

AKG and KM84s only