Recording Sound The Alarm at Johnston St Jazz

The Setup

The first thing to note about the recording Sound the Alarm is the room, it was recorded in a converted church that is now used for community events. It is a fairly large space with high ceilings and reflective walls. This makes the space quite "boomy" with high levels of reverb. Therefore to get the best results for the webcast and recording it is usual for us to close mic all the insruments along with room mics. As Sound the Alarm is a large ensemble this required 14 close and 2 room mics, the full layout and list are below.

The second thing to note is that the performance was recorded live in front of an audience, so microphone placement had to consider not just the instrument it was intended to capture but also spill from all the other instruments. A fairly large amount of Bleed was, of course, inevitable, but microphone type and position were considered to maximise the instrument while minimising spill. The percussion was mic'ed with a single overhead each with small condensers in hyper cardioide mode along with the clarinets. The brass was generally mic'ed with ribbons so care had to be taken with the direction the back of the mic was facing, these were slightly angled down as well as 45 degrees away from the centre of the stage. The basses and instruments with amps (guitar and keyboard) could be close mic'ed with dynamics leading to very little spill from other instruments. The cello in the center of the stage on the other hand was mic'ed with the Sontronics DB1B which is a condenser microphone so while shielded to some extent by being close to the cello did suffer some bleed from the rest of the instruments. One issue we did encounter was the amount of bleed into the piano microphone, this was a large condenser, while it was in cardioid mode it suffered from reflections from the piano lid. In hindsight, it may have been better positioned further inside the piano facing down directly at the strings.

Stage Plot

Recording

The recording itself was straightforward. As it was a live performance, there were no retakes, overdubs, or stopping. The performance was captured as a performance. The critical factor in this case then was the levels. Being live and with everything needing to be set up on the night there was only limited time for sound checks, so the levels were set as quickly as possible and left as were at the start of the performance. Luckily, we seem to get most of the right, or at least close to it so no adjustments were required during the performance.