Syrinx (1913). Composed by Claude Debussy. Performed on alto saxophone by an anonymous woman. Recorded by myself, on a Zoom H4N, in a house. No effects or processing. The recording process was fairly straightforward, although my performer was slightly ill on the day. The place we recorded in is under the flight path, which complicated matters slightly, but aircraft sound only interrupted the first take. She is an accomplished player, which made the recording somewhat easier. I had read that to record saxophone, one should put the microphone very close to the instrument (six inches from the bell), but I found that there were unwanted sounds appearing on the recording when the microphone was close to the instrument. I recorded this take in a large room of the house, taking some distance from the instrument to reduce unwanted sounds, for instance, the pressing of the keys on the saxophone was very loud from up close, but is not quite as noticeable in this take. My performer was on a stage in front of me, and I had the microphone approximately 2 to 3 metres away from the stage, pointing towards the left side of the saxophone. Perhaps this was slightly too much distance from the instrument, but as I could not edit the recording afterwards, I wanted to reduce as much as possible any unwanted/interruptive sounds from the instrument/performer. Some parts of this take could certainly be better, but as my performer was doing me a favour, I suppose I did not want to ask too much from her by doing too many takes. I am a very inexperienced producer, and only recorded one take in each position, which meant that when it came to the editing process, it was not actually possible for me to splice two takes together seamlessly. I did four takes in total, the first two being in the performers' bedroom, and the second two done in the large hall. There were obvious mistakes in all but the last take (the one I have published here) so I did not have much choice about which take to use. Another learning experience. Despite my lack of knowledge and experience, I think this take turned out nicely, mainly due to the skill of the performer. I listened to some other recordings of this song on alto sax that I found on Youtube, and in comparison I think the way this was performed was very nice, generally with a very pleasant tone if a little weak in some points (the beginning of bar 3, for example), not too brassy or grating, it was more of a soft dreamy tone from the saxophone, and I found the pace of the song worked very well. Some other versions I heard were a bit too fast I thought, and had a somewhat harsh tone from the saxophone, so overall I was very impressed with the interpretation of my performer. In terms of editing, I had to demonstrate that I could splice two tracks together and although it didn’t work very well because all my takes were in different positions, one thing I found was that the breath marks on the sheet music helped me to find suitable points to cuts sections out as there is a natural pause from the performer in these sections. This was one aspect that made it perhaps easier to edit than some other instruments.

bluecrippling