Making the most of the mic: A self-employed musician’s guide to recording

This article was originally published in our Summer 2022 issue. Click here to subscribe to our quarterly print magazine and be the first to read our Summer issue features.

Recording has become the lifeblood of the professional musician over the last few years. Whether preparing for a professional studio date, recording a lesson for reference, or producing content for any one of the myriad digital platforms that underpin our lives as working musicians, the microphone has become part of our daily routine. Over the next two pages, this guide will take you through everything you need to know to survive the world of recording.

Professional studios come in all shapes and sizes, from the cavernous Abbey Road or Real World to the cosy and intimate booths of tracking suites for singers. The key to a successful recording, irrespective of the space, is preparation. Something in the dynamic of multiple takes, overdubbing and editing has taken away from the permanence of recording as a medium. The better you know your music, the longer you have lived with it and made those all-important interpretative decisions, the more satisfied you are likely to be with the end result.

Steve Long of venerable label Signum Records emphasises the significance of finding the right producer for the right project. ‘It’s important to find people who will not only work well together but will have the same vision for the finished recording,’ he says. For a studio session, be prepared to play the same piece, or even the same short passage of a single piece, multiple times. Understanding the studio, engineer, and their process is key to getting the result you want. Because of the requirement to pick up from specific places, it is likely that you will be playing from a score, even if you have the repertoire thoroughly memorised. A little thought about the quietest way to deal with page turns will make your engineer particularly happy.

The digital age has provided musicians of all stripes with a host of options outside of the traditional recording studio. For musicians looking to capture sound for themselves, there are two primary methods: recording into a device with a hard drive, or capturing directly into a computer. Of the first, the most common device is the ubiquitous phone.

The average smart phone microphone is primarily designed to capture speech rather than music. This means that it prioritises frequencies in the 200Hz to 2kHz range. While this is more than adequate to capture most instruments, the top and bottom ends of the range of piano, guitar and particularly high or low singing voices tend to get a bit muffled. This doesn’t mean that good results cannot be achieved, but some experimentation will be required.

Start by placing your phone at least two metres from where the tone rises on your instrument, potentially further away for pianos. Find the sweet spot in your room – the point where the sound is most balanced and natural. This should be away from corners, which emphasis low-end frequencies and make the sound more ‘boomy’, and away from hard reflective surfaces (tables, chairs, etc).

Signum Records’ Steve Long pairs projects and producers for the perfect recording ©Marshall Light

A phone tripod, for example the Polarduck Stand Mount, or a cushion, together with some experimentation make for an easy and inexpensive way of controlling your recording position. Be sure to clear the path between your instrument and the microphone, as any obstacles are likely to mean that you are capturing reflections of the sound rather than the direct source.

It may take some experimentation to get the best sound out of a phone. For better results you might also consider downloading a dedicated recording app. Dolby On, a free app for Android and iPhone, has a number of clever features: it removes background noise, balances out some of the imperfections in your phone’s microphone and automatically adjusts the playback volume to commercial levels. For even more control, AudioShare from Kymatica AB offers a range of level, file type and editing capabilities for the more adventurous field recordist.

For the musician looking for cleaner audio without diving too far into the world of recording, the next logical step would be to add an external microphone to your phone. This area is slightly problematic – there are a host of products on the market offering only minimal improvement over the built-in recording capabilities of most devices. However, the Zoom Am7 MS Stereo Microphone, one of my personal favourites, offers a much more accurate and vibrant reproduction of the top and bottom end of my piano and allows for stereo capture.

Stereo sound – the result of a remarkably simple idea from EMI engineer Alan Blumlein, who discovered that using level differences between two speakers allows you to create the illusion of three dimensional space – has been the bedrock of recording for the last 50 years. The general rule for deciding whether to record in stereo (with multiple microphones) or mono is that single sound points like voices and instruments with single sound holes should be captured in mono, using a single microphone only.

Alternatively, for a simple stereo capture, the intrepid musician may wish to experiment with a dedicated Zoom recorder. These rugged, portable devices offer a full stereo capture without the need to purchase and set up external microphones. Ranging from the card-sized H1 to the sci-fi heft of the H6, Zoom recorders write sound directly to interchangeable cards, allowing for unlimited hours of capture, storage and management of sound recordings. The antennae microphones can be adjusted from 90° to 130° allowing for control over the width of the stereo image.

With some rehearsal, the balance between capturing room ambience and the direct sound of an instrument or voice can easily be found. Once the sweet spot for any particular combination of instrument and space has been located, I would advise photographing the recording position. It will save a lot of unnecessary retesting and relocating before future sessions.

It is tempting, as a first-time sound recordist, to pick the most reverberant spaces available. Churches and bathrooms offer us, as players, an inflated sense of sound based on the number of reflections we hear from the plethora of hard surfaces around us. However, it’s important to remember that we are experiencing that sound world from the player’s perspective and that a microphone set three or four metres away will pick up a very different experience. The balance of instrument or voice sound and room can quickly tip over into the muffled and indistinct.

One of the easiest ways to understand a space is to listen to a colleague performing, play back a professional recording, or even just hum or clap while you move around the room. I have seen experienced engineers wander around a recording space clicking their fingers for hours before putting up a single microphone. If you have access to a permanent recording space, for instance a music room or living space, it would be worth considering investing in some acoustic treatment to aid with any problems. For example, the bass sound collecting in one corner of the room can be fixed by using a bass trap. These range from foam-filled panels such as at Gik Acoustic range, to elegant geometric diffusers such as the Thomann Hofa.

Long has been in the recording game for longer than even this year’s 25^th anniversary of his label suggests. His advice to classical musicians has remained consistent: ‘You’re capturing the room as much as the instruments in the room. The space we record in is hugely important’.

For the final stage on any sound recordists’ journey, you will want to dive into the world of external microphones. These can either function with your Zoom device or can record directly into your computer via either USB or an audio interface. A typical first audio interface is Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, which supports two microphones with separate levels for each. The Audient iD14 MKII offers a similar level of functionality, with additional headphone sockets for a second listener and noticeably smoother, clearer preamps, which will support a range of microphones.

For an entry-level external microphone, the Behringer C-2 makes a good starting point, although with a pronounced frequency curve which may colour particularly high or low instruments or voices. The SE7 from sE Electrics make a more versatile entry into stereo pair recording and comes with a handy spacing bar. For those with more of a budget, and more interest in crystal clear sound, the Shure SM 81 or Audix F9 make beautiful and accurate reference microphones which work in a surprising number of environments. For truly professional results, the mainstay of my studio is a pair of C414 microphones from AKG, which get used for everything from double bass to coloratura soprano. For a high-end result, Russian-American pianist Vladimir Horowitz employed a pair of Schoeps CMC6 MK2 for his final home recordings, which are still widely available.

Whatever your needs, and whatever your budget, there is a recording solution. This journey will require some patience, experimentation and adventure, but the benefits reaped for your musicianship will more than reward the investment.