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I am doing a session next Tuesday. The purpose is to capture a young lady's performance, before she goes off to university to study vocal performance - her mother wants an archive of Emily's sound, before the onset of intense traiining, and while she is still a "girl". It doesn't take long for young voices to develop thier adult timbre, once the age of twenty is near and the voice starts being excercised and trained intensely. the repertoire will be mostly classical. I made an audition disc and she was accepted at UCLA, but has instead opterd for a university here in Canada that has an outstanding performance program. as this is archival there will not be much post production time invested, so I want to get something good to listen to, but not overly concerned with issues I'd normally be thinking through - primarily thinking of bleed here. Accompaniist will be on a grand piano (excellent player). Acoustic is a church - not overly resonant, but even and sweet. I have recorded choirs there many times.
My question is how to set up in this situation. There will be solos mostly, but there will be a second vocalist to do three duets.
For the soloists, I was thinking of putting two PZMs under a closed lid on the piano, placing the vocalist away from the piano, as much as I can get away with so the pianist can hear the vocalist. I'd give the vocalist my Studio project tube mic, and then set a mid side array using my dual LDC stereo mic, about 20 feet back equadistant from piano and vocal to capture the space. this is fairly straight forward. Iwould use the mid side and augment with the close mics.
I am having more trouble deciding how to handle the duets. I could give them both LDC, as I have the MXL 990 ( that saw lots of use in previous times ) hanging about or I could go with a pair of SDC (Akg 535) that I have used for vocal on occasion. Or I could reconfigure and make a Mid Side using the tube vocal mic and one of the AKGs This would allow me to use the Stereo (St Project's LSD2) to have the duet sing into. they would be able to stand side by side, as they are used to doing. But their voices would be "together". the individual mics would allow them to get closer to the mic. I'd use pop screens in this case. I would be able to eq them individually if I chose to after the fact. And I would have some proximity effect with which to work too.
but the Stereo for the pair might be just the ticket. If I go for this. They both are strong singers. Should I Have them sing towards the bisecting line of a 90 degree XY, or stand a little futher apart and direct their voice to the indiviual capsules of the pair, and if I go this route, would i use the cardiod setting, figure 8 or Omni? should I have the stereo pair at 90 degrees or something less or more?
the upside is the clients are very nice, and will be happy with what I do. both time I've worked for this mother turned out well. Her daughter was accepted (after the audition disc she flew to LA to audition) and the other time the mom's band won the best overall in Ontario - Elemntary School Band (association of music festivals) .
So any opinions are welcomed - I could use more or less mics than I've described too, or would be willing to try something completely different upon someone's suggestion.
Anyone out there got any experience in this field, or willing to imagine how to accomplish a good session in such circumstance?
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Byron
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