Setup

My goal was to have a rich, liquid and spacious stereo piano supporting Kyoko’s remarkable voice, which was placed front and center. Further, I wanted a strong set of early reflections from which to build a hall reverb for the final recording, using Lexicon’s NuVerb. Expressed in A+B/A-B thinking: Kyoko should be A+B with some stereo ambience and the piano should be A,B with much ambience (see my article on thinking this way about stereo in the Dec. ‘93 issue of Recording).

The primary recording setup was pretty straightforward. I removed the lid from the piano and used a pair of B&K omnis about 2’ above the central part of the sounding board (away from the hammers, to get that languid liquid piano sound). The piano was placed fairly close to the back and side walls of the room to give a rich volley of early reflections. I had Kyoko and Dalton find a position for her to stand that was comfortable for both of them. Then I placed a Soundfield ST250 microphone set in Blumlein mode (a stereo configuration equivalent to an XY pair of bidirectional mics), plus a Head Acoustics dummy head mic and a pair of B&K spaced omnis about 2 feet away from her. The ST250 was elevated slightly.

Finally, about 12 feet back and 10 feet up in the air, looking away from the performers and into the room, was a second Soundfield ST250, in Middle-Side mode, gathering room ambience.

	Saito Session Signal Flow Chart. We used the spaced omnis that were on the piano and the two ST250s for the live-to-two mix. The other mics were for research purposes, and ran to ADAT. No EQ, no compression. Reverb on the monitor mix to help the producer auralize the final sound.

For monitoring, I alternated between the house system and a pair of Genelec 1030As. I was going to use Paradigm Mini Mk. IIIs, but a woofer problem that showed up during setup made that impossible.

During the actual recordings we made micro-adjustments to vocal presence and vocal/piano balance acoustically, by having Kyoko step forward toward the mic array, or back from it. Occasionally, she did this as part of performance, when necessary.

The multiple pairs of mics on Kyoko were there for research purposes. I am very interested in the Head Acoustics Dummy Head microphone, because it is the first binaural mic I’ve heard that sounds good over speakers. I arranged to borrow it from the importer, Sonic Perceptions (Norwalk CT) for this session. I ran the two Soundfield ST250s, the Head Acoustics mic and the spaced omnis on the vocalist to 8 channels of ADAT. We used none of this for the finished recording and didn’t even listen to it at the time other than to check print. I’ll do an article on how these sound (along with examples on the Playback CD) later this year.

During setup, I removed all absorbers and baffles from the studio, making it as reverberant as possible. As soon as we started working on sounds, it was clear that the sound was too live (particularly the piano, which was quite swimmy, if you know what I mean), so I added back a little absorption – hung a few moving pads on the far side walls and a big 4x8x1.5’ foam-block absorber out on the floor. The other thing I did, at the suggestion of the studio’s assistant engineer, Tom Bender, was to put a few RPG Abfusers on the floor under the piano, to take out the specular floor reflections without changing the reverberance. This worked wonderfully well! A handy little studio trick to keep in mind!