Don Camillo Choir: 'Trude The Bumblebee'

[The_Metallurgist]

Interesting, I found most of the recordings that I referenced, distance the choir with a large ambient room sound which made up for the majority of what I was hearing, almost a back row seat situation. Where as this recording is more intimate and detailed. Making the room sound bigger and full is very challenging especially with all the close mic's involved. Hopefully Dave you will find time to assemble something for us to listen to. I would love to hear your work around with this particular multi. Complete with your written thesis it would make for an educational thread for sure. No pressure of course

the sweat is already running!

ordinarily, i think we are accustomed to hearing choirs in larger spaces. much of the BBC stuff i've referenced for other things, is performed this way too. the trouble with the recordings, however, is that darn small room signature that's firmly etched into each microphone. this signature cannot be removed. so planting a small room ambiance inside a larger one (the larger one we are accustomed to hearing in performances) doesn't work, won't work because this never happens in nature and as humans, we are programmed to understand acoustics....what we see supports what we hear. in audio, we only have our ears to make judgements, but the brain still understands those spatial cues thereby preventing us from creating an illusion of a larger room here, sadly.

i don't know if this will help, but i made the executive decision to DELETE the room mics (and some others...), main1 and 2. i considered neither of them were beneficial to the task at hand, rightly or wrongly. the fact we cannot control the bass decay nor the likely combfiltering effects from the early reflections of the room, make these worthy contenders for the sin-bin. it also helps reduce the conflicts in the time domain as well (phase with the other mics). it then leaves us free to make our own room mics up by utilizing a stereo reverb (with small room attributes, of course!). we can then shape the thing exactly how we want, and balance the wet and dry to taste as well. you can compress, EQ, pan, choose delay, dial decay, low pass, high pass, distort(!), wide width, narrow width, explore different mixes of early and late reflections, try mono, plate, spring, synthetic, convolution, cheap, expensive, or woteva ya fancy......think of it, FREEDOM of choice!

where we put it in the signal chain is optional of course. it might be valid setting it up as an aux and feeding the group busses into this accordingly and to taste (even individual tracks....if you felt like it). it also lets us choose where the signal of the feed appears which can be helpful in how the bass elements are distributed (i.e. their balance in the stereo domain) within it. but whatever, it gives us more options over the project.

it might even be possible to cheat the room size somewhat by taking out the main mic culprits and selectively shaping each of the remaining close mics....but i wouldn't bet my pension on the relative success of that outcome, however it's perhaps worth exploring if only for the hell of it.

i don't want to be taking over the thread, but i think this is important and i've nowhere else to say it: the very thing i thought wouldn't be a problem is actually my major headache....no, it's not the whistler lol. i can't get this lead vocal to work no matter what i do to it. it sounds to me like it's been EQ'd to take out the low-end congestion from a confined, inadequately treated space. however, the upper harmonics from this space (the signature) still exist. it sounds terrible. my dreams of turning this into a U87 tracked in a professional studio don't quite seem to be panning out. we can smack a snare's EQ around with abundant frivolity and the mother-in-law won't bat an eyelid, but get the voice wrong and she will know instinctively. then it distracts. if anyone has an idea, i'm all ears! yeah, i thought about muting it

Don, save us!