Canare is a wise choice. The Earthworks/Grace combo is very high quality and will afford you plenty of dynamic range. Depending on the recording room, care will have to be taken to afford an overly clean sound. The only other critical piece of equipment is the A/D converter. You might want to rent an Apogee, dB Tech or Prism and compare them to the Alesis. One last point, the vibration isolation of the microphone and the microphone preamp are important. Best of luck!
Jekyll and Hyde, aka the Audiophile/Pro Conundrum
Decided to finally install an Alesis Masterlink-based recording adjunct to my 2 ch ref system to record my Steinway B. A pro recording prof at Berklee will do the mic placement, and suggested I get Earthworks omnis and excellent-sounding cheap Canare StarQuad mic cables, as well
as super-clean Class A Grace preamp.
So I bought 50 feet of this nice soft cable for a ridiculous $0.44/ft, a bunch of XLRs, and connected the mics through the under-piano-mounted pre over to the Alesis in a total of two 25' runs. I decided to mount the Masterlink atop my Aleph P (as it's large and 35 lbs), instead of near my MD 100 tuner, so as it came time to interconnect the Alesis and the Aleph P I needed short XLRs.
So here's where the left and right sides of me 'lil brain collided! I started by buying another pair of Red Dawn XLR 1m ICs (I'd just sold a pair last year!), and installed this longish pair across the connectors 4" distances.
Felt pretty silly installing $225 worth of used RD after using 25' of 44c/ft supposedly-great mic cable. So I bought a 1m Canare XLR for $12 and made it into 2 18" cables, and replaced the RD, which is now on auction here.
Which way would you have gone here? After all...etc., etc.!
Jekyll or Hyde?? Cheers. Ern
as super-clean Class A Grace preamp.
So I bought 50 feet of this nice soft cable for a ridiculous $0.44/ft, a bunch of XLRs, and connected the mics through the under-piano-mounted pre over to the Alesis in a total of two 25' runs. I decided to mount the Masterlink atop my Aleph P (as it's large and 35 lbs), instead of near my MD 100 tuner, so as it came time to interconnect the Alesis and the Aleph P I needed short XLRs.
So here's where the left and right sides of me 'lil brain collided! I started by buying another pair of Red Dawn XLR 1m ICs (I'd just sold a pair last year!), and installed this longish pair across the connectors 4" distances.
Felt pretty silly installing $225 worth of used RD after using 25' of 44c/ft supposedly-great mic cable. So I bought a 1m Canare XLR for $12 and made it into 2 18" cables, and replaced the RD, which is now on auction here.
Which way would you have gone here? After all...etc., etc.!
Jekyll or Hyde?? Cheers. Ern
3 responses Add your response
Thanks. I hung the pre under the piano keyboard with industrial velcro, so it's impervious to conducted vibration, but certainly not airborne (shouldn't be much of a problem with ss?). The Earthworks will PROBABLY be hung from the ceiling in the Berklee-favored spaced-pair-over- the-hammers geometry, rather than finicky xy or Blumlein. We'll see. I wonder what an "overly clean" sound is? Ah, you probably mean without sufficient "room sound". Yeah, I hope I don't have to mix in another pair of omnis for ambience, as the room is only 14x24, and I do NOT want to add a mixer, etc. I'm sure it'll come together with two mics somehow. The Steinway is voiced warmly, so as to please ME at my sitting position while playing (lid down), so the mics will probably be just in front of my head, behind the music stand (uh oh...first reflections therefrom?). Thanks. |
By overly clean I meant that the Earthworks/Grace combo will have very little editorial effect on the recorded signal. They will not soften or "pretty up" the sound. This may be exactly what you want. Take the time to experiment extensively with mic positioning. Also don't dismiss using a high end reverb unit (Lexicon or tc electronics, or if cost is no object the top of the line Sony or Yamaha). The purist in you may cringe, but recording is a creative process and whatever works, works. The Sony and Yamaha units are quite fascinating. Where other reverb units use programming to simulate various acoustical spaces, both the Sony and Yamaha use actual recordings of real concert halls to produce their reverbs. The below link is a review of the Yamaha from Mix: http://mixonline.com/ar/audio_yamaha_srev/ |