Recording Horns
Today I had the pleasure of tracking a 3 person horn section with trombone, alto sax and trumpet/flugel horn. It was amazing!
I spent a fair bit of time researching mic placement for close and room mic positions, and specifically for each type of horn. There’s a boat-load of great resource material online, so I’ll just put down what I ended up using for mics and how I positioned them.
I found that just like every other aspect of recording and music, there are a million opinions about how and what to do when recording brass instruments. I tried to find the average of all that I read, and combine that with my own sense of what would work. The considerations I based decisions on were: 1) the type of music being tracked, and 2) the limitations of the room/gear available. I’ve got a reasonable collection of microphones for a project studio, which was helpful to draw from in this recording situation.
As it was a section playing in a supporting role without any solo work, I decided to go with a stereo room mic setup as my main sound source. I also wanted to close mic everything so that I could help define or adjust specific horn levels in that “space” if I needed to. Phase cancellation wasn’t a huge problem as the intention was to use the close mic source quite sparingly. Nevertheless, I performed a number of mono collapses through the session just to be sure things were working alright.
My room mics were M-Audio Pulsar II matched pair condensers placed in the NOS pattern. (mics oriented 90 degrees from each other, with the capsules measuring 30cm apart). I raised them to about 5 ft high and spread them centred toward the horn players at about 5 ft in front.
For the trombone I put to work my AudioTechnica AT2050, cardioid pattern, slightly below the bell by about 2-3 inches, and about 3 feet back. I had tried a closer proximity but it was providing a lot of unpleasant sizzle and spitty sort of detail and not capturing the full sound. Moving it back a foot really helped. The trumpet was served by my Heil PR40, about 3 feet back, pointing up towards the bell, perhaps an inch below the bell’s centre. The saxophone was treated to my EV Cardinal red-series mic, placed about 6 inches above the bell, pointed down toward it, but on the left side of the instrument in order to capture a blend of detail coming from the keys and the main sound from the bell.
The NOS technique captured my small-ish live room really well, giving a believable soundstage with depth and stereo spread both pleasing to the ear. Prior to the session I had hung a bed comforter from the ceiling to eliminate some flutter I was hearing while clapping around the space looking for a sweet spot. I also set up some acoustic gobo’s off to the side of the section to keep things focused in my oddly shaped room.
All of these mics were sent through a Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56. Nice clean pre’s with enough gain to pull up the quiet parts, quietly, and a rock solid A/D conversion which proved to be tight and deep sounding. Very much a pleasure to use this interface. I did not employ any of the Liquid emulations for this session as I wasn’t familiar enough with them to gamble on signals pre-“tape”.
As expected, the close mic’d instruments were a bit thin sounding, but without the luxury of time to play with many mics or positions, the configuration provided exactly what we were looking for, which was some well-defined character and articulation as well as the ability to bring focus to one or more horns as required. We had to hit 5 songs in 3 hours so it was a tight schedule.
The players were very professional skill-wise, and adjusted the blend between themselves naturally, which made the room micing very successful. A nice full sound was achieved. I’d love to have a matched pair of large diaphragm condensers to work with… someday!
All in all it was a fabulous session and everyone had a good time. The sounds are tight and punchy and really, that’s what we wanted. Now I just need a couple of RE20’s, some MD421’s, a pair of 414’s and I’d be all set. 
Comments
Great and informative article!
Thanks
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