David
In general, books and book-shelves are the best things you can have
for improving a recording studio or listening room. It should not
make the room dry, but break up all the standing waves. In my
listening room, I obtained a huge improvement by adding book shelves
on the rear wall, and when I had to remove them during decoration,
the room became far too echoey and over-bright.
Glass windows are also often a problem, especially if they are old
fashioned thin ones. The thicker plate-glass ones do not add so much
reverb, but they still do reflect energy.
On the other hand, if you open the windows the sound level of the
sounds within the listening or recording room will tend to drop. This
is not just because of extraneous noise.
In fact, it is strange that extraneous noises are not necessarily a
bad thing in a recording. If they are not too off-putting, they can
make you feel that the event is more live.
I have noticed birds chirping on one of Anthony Bailes recordings,
and I always listen for them. A passing motor-bike, on the other
hand, might not be ideal.
It is also possible to change the characteristics of the room, by
hanging mirrors to make the sound brighter and more reverberant, or
some sound absorbing material to darken and remove reverb. These do
not have to be very big, if they are well placed in relation to the
listener or the mikes.
I agree that external mikes are necessary. Any internal mike will
pick up noise from the component, and of course there is no way of
placing the mikes in relation to the player.
Amateur players who record themselves on computers should try to cut
out the digital board of the computer for similar reasons. I have
previously mentioned the Transit M-Audio as a cheap alternative to
the internal board that takes up very little space. You can also use
it for play back, again to cut out the internal board of the computer.
If you happen to have a good portable cassette recorder you can use
that as a preamp for the mikes. I have a Sony TCD5M, and also a Sony
Walkman Pro. Both can be used as acceptable preamps, so that it is
possible to use just about any microphone, and of course they do not
take up much space. I generally use this set-up for recording voice
for phonetic analysis. However, it does make acceptable recordings of
music.
I use a MAC i-book, and record with the programmes Amadeus II, and
Amadeus Pro. Amadeus Pro would allow multi tracking ( up to 5 tracks,
I think). They both also have noise reduction programmes, although I
find you lose too much detail and the noise gate is completely
audible to me. I personally think that a minimum of sound treatment
is best. No reverb, is I think generally better than even a small
amount of reverb. Both programmes allow you to record in MP3 or
MPEG4. Amadeus Pro allows you to burn your recording to an audio CD
straight away from within the programme.
There is an "effect"" in Amadeus for altering "Tonalité" and
"Vitesse". This makes it possible to slow down a recording while
keeping the same diapason. I used this the other day to decipher the
variations that Jacob Heringman had used in his interpretation of a
piece of music. You can repeat a few notes until you are happy you
have noted them. If the lute did not happen to be in the same
diapason as your lute, it would be possible to use "Tonalité" to
alter the diapason of the recording.
It would also be possible to make a sonagramme with Amadeus and use
the cursor to directly read off the notes played (in half tones or in
absolute Hertz values). I have not tried this with music, but it
works well for a quick overview of the pitch changes in speech. It
certainly should work for music as I think that was what it was
intended for. The name Amadeus, at least, would lead me to believe
that was the case. I imagine similar programmes must exist for
Windows, but I am unable to give any information on them.
However, for phonetic analysis, I also use PRAAT http://
www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/. This a free programme that allows you to
make spectrograms, pitch and formant analysis, but I suppose it could
also be used for analyzing music. The advantage of PRAAT is that it
will work with any computer MAC, Windows, Linux, etc.
Best regards
Anthony
Le 14 juin 07 à 00:12, LGS-Europe a écrit :
> Thanks for all the feed back, I just got back and was pleasantly
> surprised
> with the number of good comments.
>
> I did the reverb after downloading a plugin (never did that before)
> for
> audacity. Straight out of the box, didn't change any settings. It's
> way over
> the top, so I far prefer the one without reverb, but I realise it
> is _very_
> dry. This was recorded in my _very_ dry study, too many books, so
> I'll get
> back to the living room for more experiments.
>
> To be continued.
>
> David
>
>
> ****************************
> David van Ooijen
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> www.davidvanooijen.nl
> ****************************
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Anthony Hind" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "LGS-Europe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Lute Net"
> <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 4:13 PM
> Subject: Re: [LUTE] home recordings
>
>
> I far prefer the non reverb sound. I agree with John Buchman
> (Magantune) that choosing a large hall for recording lute or
> harpsichord is a mistake.
> If you add reverb, it has a siliar effect. I know that MP3 is a
> little thin, but I don't think that reverb is the way out of this.
> That is just my oppinion, and others may be used to that added glow.
> Best regards
> Anthony
>
> Le 13 juin 07 à 11:38, LGS-Europe a écrit :
>
>> I've bought myself a recorder and put the first trials on my
>> website. Go
>> to
>> Home recordings in the left hand menu. Have to run now.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>> ****************************
>> David van Ooijen
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> www.davidvanooijen.nl
>> ****************************
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> To get on or off this list see list information at
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>
>
>
>
