My first paid recording (Civil War Brass Band lololol)

[LydonB]

cool dude...sounds good.

the finger clicks are not your fault I have no idea how you could get rid of them haha

Get some felt pads under the buttons on the valves.

To get rid of it in the mix, check out the demo of Izotope RX.

 

[Morgan C]

Lots of finger clicks from the brass instruments. Tell those guys they need some new pads under their valve buttons!

That must have been what I was hearing.

 

[Metaltastic]

Wow, thanks a ton guys, really great to come home to all this feedback! (totally coincidentally, I just came home from seeing this with my folks ) I've been back and forth about whether or not to give it some high-shelf boosting, but reading some of your suggestions has convinced me to give it a go! (either on the master bus or one of the stereo-pair buses, we shall see) And those clicks are indeed from the valves (and the breathing is indeed, well, breathing ), but these are period correct instruments with all rotary-action valves (rather than piston), so the clicking is par for the course I'm afraid! (although honestly, I don't see why it would be so hard to incorporate felt into a rotary design - but trust me, these guys don't fuck around, so if it were possible and/or historically correct, they would have done it!).

Ear-gasm dude! I know my boys in the FCBB are well represented in this mix!

Sorry again I couldn't meet up with you when you were down in this area. How's the rest of the disc going? Will it be out for purchase this year?

Thanks Andrew, and I'm sure there will be another opportunity for our paths to cross The plan is for me to mail the master CD's to Heather by the end of this coming week, so it should be good to go by early December I'd say! And it's gonna be 17 pieces totaling 35 minutes recorded over two days in that auditorium (including the above piece), 3 pieces recorded live at Ford's Theater (used just the 414's in AB Omni and the John Hardy for that), and one that was recorded just last week by one of the assistant engineers at UMBC (which I will soon receive the files for, and will have to edit and mix as well arrgghhh )

Very, very fucking GREAT WORK!!! Respect, Marcus I also was asked to record a choir & orchestra..but I didn´t had the balls to do it then. Your work inspires me to try it, as well. Good deal with the equipment stuff...damn this idea was pretty good!

Thanks man, and yeah, you should totally go for it! I'm of course no expert, but if you want any help feel free to PM me!

The lead trumpet lines sound very nice and clean. Generally the difficulty with brass is that they are so harsh. They definitely do not sound harsh to me. Good job. The localization of the lead trumpet is fantastic as well. I can see exactly where he is sitting when I close my eyes. With live recordings of ensembles like this, I think that is really important.

Did you spot mic any of the percussion at all?

Thanks a lot dude, I have to say I think a big part of that lack of harshness was all that 2k vacuuming I mentioned above, I must have sucked out something like a combined 40 dB between all the mics I really think the XY pair and that Decca setup really contributed to the localization; honestly, I wasn't planning on using all 7 of those main stereo mics (Decca, XY, Blum), but each added something that I liked when I mixed it in, so I kept 'em! And yeah, there was a KSM141 pointing in the general area of the snare head a couple of feet back, and a D112 on the BD maybe a foot back. Cymbals definitely didn't need any help being heard

 

[GarethSE]

You should try and get permission to upload the raws to a song or something. I dunno about anyone else, but I'd love to have a go at mixing smething like this.

 

[LydonB]

I'd be interested to hear just the stereo pairs by themselves.

 

[dcb]

really cool work !
maybe a little air would be cool, but listening to this on headphones (AKG), i feel like sitting in the room with the musicians playing!
really nice!

great job marcus!

 

[Damian B]

Awesome job dude, sounds pretty killer.

 

[Metaltastic]

Thanks dudes, I appreciate it! And here's another piece, this one from the Sunday session; for whatever reason, I think I prefer the sound of the mixes from the pieces recorded that day (since we had to take down all the mics after Friday's recording session, it was inevitable there would be some differences - also, there were a couple of different players, and the seating arrangement was changed).

FCBB - Old Joe Hooker.mp3

And for anyone interested, here are the raw tracks to the above piece! (still uploading as I write this, so if the link doesn't work, give it a couple minutes ) And I'll save you the trouble of having to deal with finding where all the spot mics should be panned to match up in the stereo field with their respective instruments, so here's how I panned everything:

Decca L+C+R, XY L+R, and Blum L+R I think you can guess
Eb Cornets - L60
Bb Cornets - R60
Tubas - L29
Baritone - L20
Altos - R11
Tenors - R29
Snare + BD - Center

Also, I had the Eb and Bb cornet tracks pretty much inaudible in the mix (there was already plenty in the stereo mics), automating one or the other up only when a part needed to be louder. Enjoy!

 

[Felix Neumann]

Damn..I want this as the soundtrack for the next Call of Duty - Getteysburg

Did you use some kind of reference CD to compare? This part sounded good, as well!! Nothing to complain.