The first song for my portfolio is an original acoustic track performed by singer\songwriter Sam Fitzjohn, an artist who has been performing for over 10 years. 

For this recording I decided to set up 3 microphones, two AKG C414 in a blumlein setup and a Neumann TLM103 aimed at the neck to pick up the strings. For vocals (admittedly we were running out of studio time) we decided too carry on using the Neumann TLM103 as it is a condenser microphone.

When mixing and mastering I did hear the high vocals sounded a little bit distorted, since we've recorded backing vocals I kept the high notes low in the mix. i wanted a richer, thicker presence so I boosted the EQ settings at 300Hz to 800Hz and tried to gain a brighter feel to the vocals by boosting once again at 6KHz.

The main guitar rhythm I wanted to hear the strings being struck so I used EQ and boost 10KHz but only by 6dB but cutting at 800Hz at -6dB so it didn't sound like a tin can.

For the lead guitar i didn't want the plucking of the strings to over power the song, once again I got out the EQ and cut a few EQ at 100Hz, 200Hz and 2KHz but boosting at about 3.5KHz to give it a bit of presence.

Also adding Reverb to give a less static feel and compression to multiple channels to brighten up the low ends yet bring down the high ends.

Any comments and criticism are welcomed.

Sam Fitzjohn - In to the Sky

This was a new experience, when the opportunity came to record an orchestra I couldn't pass it up, however this is just a practise session for the orchestra either way a few others and me gave recording it ago.

Never having recorded an orchestra before we didn't know what microphones to use but the strategy was more microphones the better. Obviously we couldn't mic each player since there was 50 of them so after a bit of research we settled on two Shure SM58, two AKG C414 and an amazing SoundField Mark5. With these we had to use a RedNet system and laptop to record as this was on location recording and not at the Uni. To add to our misery we didn't know how big or what shape the room was so we went there with blind faith.

There, we see that it’s a pretty big gymnasium with lots of chairs and form boards, the roof had big light fixture so it wasn’t straight which is good but we knew that not much post production could be done to this orchestra in this room and our microphone techniques and that it was pretty much all in the pre production

Having a think we decided to place the SoundField mic behind the conductor but at a distance, slightly under that two AKG C414s in a blumlein set up and to the far left and far right we set up the Shure SM58s. 

With over 80 minutes of recording everyone in our group grabbed a copy and the postproduction began. First I had to find a decent 3-minute clip but since this was just a practise session for the orchestra they stopped, a lot. After cutting and pasting I finally have my 3 and a half-minute piece

I added a bit of reverb as it did sound fairly dry, using a big room size and a reverb time of 1.1 seconds I used this method on the SoundField and the AKGs but left the SM58s dry as if I did add reverb to them the whole song would of sound a bit too ‘washed out’.

Also adding slight EQ to the SoundField mic to excite the high end frequencies  and a compression on the master fader there wasn’t really much more that could be done without it sounding too over the top.

As always any criticism  is welcomed. 

Orchestra

Welcome to my personal protfolio that I'm creating for my university projects, even though the production side of things wasn't created by myself I did however play the role of sound engineer and done the entire mixing and mastering. I'll detail as best as I can with microphone techniques and placements as well as EQ effects and changes. Any constructive criticism is defiantly welcome. Thank You for visiting. Music Post Production.

Paul Walker MPP