I don't think EQ will do it, the free room simulator software or the more expensive professional versions help a little bit, but once you lose the essential harmonics it is difficult to replace them. When using budget mics, the main thing is minimize the reflections. So here you need a really large room, in a studio the sound insulation will invariably remove most of the high frequencies.
Most lute recordings are heavily processed in addition to recording in churches or resonant spaces, so there is a kind of artificial standard in place. The main effect of the reverb or churchy acoustic is to provide a continuous bed of sound, otherwise when shifting in and out of bar chords the sound would stop and start. This stopping and starting of the sound reflects the way the instrument actually sounds. And of course good players are better at managing the differences. The reverb/church effectively removes all or most of this aspect of the technique. You could say that in this regard the modern taste for lute has a sweet tooth--and the analogy perhaps in art would be to take the Mona Lisa and photoshop it so the colors are all really jazzed up, saturated and vibrant. Then the painting would look nice and kodachromy, but you would lose the sfumato.--the integral transitional elements. On the other hand, just like a really good restoration, a tiny hint of sound processing might bring us back closer in sound to the best lutes played by the best players. The current state of recording exists however to cover up or remove mistakes, not to amplify the intrinsic beauty of the instrument. Paradoxically, the very best lutes by modern makers are not always the ones best represented in recordings. I heard a Gottlieb lute once that had the most unbelievable sound, yet the internal resonance was not ideal to apply reverb either as a church or with software--and this is as it should be! That lute needed only a nice room and a player--it would be the "Truth Lute"--beautiful yet revealing. But it would be difficult to record that instrument and bring it into the sugary mainstream. dt At 09:04 AM 3/16/2008, you wrote: >Thanks a lot! That's really helpful. This obviously means one has to have >top quality gear and a big experience in positioning mics and setting all >the thing in order to sound just natural, which explains quite a lot why >it's so expensive to record in a professional studio. However thinking in a >budget way (even if our equipment allows for 88.2/24) I wonder if there are >ways of correcting (by EQ ?)already amateurish recordings, mainly problems >that are caused by cheaper mics like metallic or hissing sound quality (very >common!). > >JL To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
