#jazzquarter

Re:live Recording’s Rob Baldock was working in Nottingham recently, so he didn’t have to take his live recording set up - which includes 48 channels of Audient ASP880 mic preamps - too far. This week, he tells us how he went about recording some jazz...nice.

We were asked to provide multi-track recording services for a series of live performances at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham for a pilot of a new TV show called ‘Sounding Out’ – featuring classical and jazz performances in a live setting.

Day one of the shoot was with the Ben Martin Jazz Quartet. A four-piece band with drums, piano, bass and sax. With everything being acoustic, and the beautiful acoustics of the Royal Concert Hall, I wanted to make sure I had some of the best mics I could get my hands on. Luckily for me, the film company shooting the performance, Spool Films, have some of the best sounding mics around! So I went with 2 x BBC Coles 4038 ribbons, 2 x Neumann M149 Tube, 2 x Neumann KM183 and 2 x AKG C414 matched pair.

These mics went straight to my Audient ASP880s and into my RME Fireface UFX – recording was handled by Reaper.

For anyone that hasn’t used Reaper before, you should really check it out. I’ve ended up using it for pretty much all of my live recordings because not only is it completely reliable (I’ve tried REALLY hard to crash it and it just won’t give up recording!) – but it also records to two destinations at the same time. So if one hard drive goes down for any reason, you’ve always got a safe copy on another drive! I’ve tested out all of the major DAWs for recording purposes and Reaper outdoes them all in terms of reliability.

I set the mics up as follows:

Kick / front of kit – Neumann M149 – no bass roll off set somewhere between omni and cardioid.

OHeads Coles 4038 x 2 – spaced pair. I started off with these a few feet above the kit but actually raised them higher because it was a little cymbal-heavy originally. I didn’t have a snare mic so wanted to capture the whole sound of the kit.

Double Bass Neumann M149 – I spent a little time doing the old  “moving one ear around” while the bass player played until I found a good sweet spot, which was relatively close but between the strings and the f-hole. I also took a DI straight from the amp which gave me some extended lower end which would be useful in the mix.

Piano AKG C414 Matched Pair – The Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham has a stunning Steinway Model D Concert Grand piano. It was tuned each day before the recordings and it just sounds wonderful. Mic’ing a piano can be an interesting challenge. Again, using the one-ear on technique, I found a couple of sweet spots. One at the far end of the piano to capture the low strings and the other nearer the keyboard end for the higher strings. Both mics were set completely flat and both on cardioid to avoid too much spill. That said, with it being completely live, some spill is unavoidable* / desirable* - *delete as applicable!

Sax KM183 – These beautiful sounding mics are really small. I wanted to go for something that would look subtle on camera but also that would sound great on Ben’s amazing sounding sax. The KM183 is the omni version of the series and, as far as I can tell, just sounds great on pretty much everything!

I also positioned two KEL HM-1s out in the auditorium to pick up some of the acoustics from the empty auditorium. Unfortunately it seems KEL are no-longer building mics under this brand. I bought a pair of the HM-1 back in 2006 and they sound amazing! I use them as ambient mics on pretty much every gig I do. They’re really clean and clear and also sound great as overheads. KEL was a Canadian company and they built some really nice sounding mics that didn’t cost all that much – especially with a favourable exchange rate. They have a new company called Vertical Microphones. They unfortunately no longer ship outside of Canada or the USA, which is a shame because if the KEL range are anything to go by, then the Vertical Microphone series I’m sure are great! I really hope I get to try some out soon!

The old cliché of getting a good recording by using great musicians, with nice sounding instruments, in a good room, through the best mics, into awesome pre-amps is completely true!  It certainly makes the mix easier!

I’ve uploaded a quick mix of one track - Surrey With The Fringe On Top – and I’ve isolated each instrument at the start, so you can hear the individual mics in their positions. Each section is highlighted with a comment marker for identification.