 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Chalumeau Joe
Date: 2005-12-21 03:35
How many of you are as bothered as I am by hearing the clarinetist's **obvious** breath sounds during a performance? I was listening to a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, K.622: First Movt: Allegro - Emma Johnson performing.
It started off lovely, as eventually did Emma, with her characteristic sweet sound...And then I kept hearing the distinct sound of air sucking. Thinking at first it must have been my trusty Norwegian Elkhound, who was at my feet snoring, I quickly realized it was...EMMA!
I found that I couldn't concentrate on the music anymore, and was completely focused on her inhalations -- they were loud! It lasted throughout the entire performance, and if I'd had a pal with me, we would have had the potential to create a nice little drinking game and bet on when her next gulp of air would occur.
Is anyone else as bothered by hearing **obvious** breath sounds on a CD? While musicians certiainly need to breath, proper mikeing techinques should help alleveiate a lot of the personal noises wheezes, grunts, and huffs, that take away from the perfect sound the instrument make
Post Edited (2005-12-21 10:40)
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2005-12-21 04:13
I've gott bring this up with my teacher next lesson.
At first, I thought that he was inhaling obnoxiously in order to get me to breathe deeply and appropriate phrase breaks. Now, I think that that's just the way he plays.
I'll figure out some way to ask him without being too irritating. Not saying, "Hey, Chip, I'm worried that you'll suck my music off the stand the way you suck."
Bob Phillips
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Author: Iacuras
Date: 2005-12-21 04:32
Think about it this way, would you rather have a big beautiful sound along with some breath sounds, or a weak feeble sound with no breath sounds? If you listen to most clarinet CD's you can hear breaths. I like it. It helps me find where to breath when I'm playing that specific piece.
Steve
"If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
"If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly."
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Author: Brenda
Date: 2005-12-21 12:30
Yes it bothers me too. But I don't understand why a pianist or a violinist needs to breathe audibly, and I've heard this distraction in performances of otherwise sublime music.
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Author: LarryBocaner ★2017
Date: 2005-12-21 13:31
I wonder if it's a too close miking problem; never heard any audible breathing at a live orchestral performance!
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2005-12-21 13:54
I personally like it. Makes it more authentic to me. When I don't hear breaths, I'm more inclined to think that it was butchered in the studio, and/or spliced together from different takes, and essentially, not an authentic one-time take.
US Army Japan Band
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Author: Shorthand
Date: 2005-12-21 15:49
For some reason current recording engineers are in love with close-miking and mixing down an ensemble afterwards. Ovbiously this reduces the number of takes, but I favor older recordings like the Mercury Living Presence series for just this reason, distance miking in a space gives a much better feel for an actual performance than a close miked, mixed down recording.
Too many tracks to play with can definitely be a curse.
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2005-12-21 16:01
I hear that, and the fact she breathes in the wrong places too.
I prefer players of a much higher calibre though, I don't regard her playing as being what some people make her out to be.
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2005-12-21 17:30
It is largely a mic problem, though loud enough breaths will be heard even on a properly-placed one. People sometimes like to put a mic really close to the clarinet (inches away?), which leads to a lot of key and breath noise, rather than a more optimal few feet away, or even further.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2005-12-22 00:04
Best recording I've heard so far, is from Paquito D'Rivera's Jazz Chamber Trio CD. I'm sure it's partially because I'm biased and love his playing, but also, after reading liner notes and whatnot, there was one mic used for the recording to pick up all three instruments, and it was (I guess) placed far enough away and in a location to pick up all three. This was to make it as authentic a recording as possible, as though you were listening in the audience (in the location of the microphone).
I think that's the way to go. No tricky uses of stereo or dolby 5.1 or 7.4 sound. Just one mic, as though you were one person sitting there at a live performance.
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
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Author: claclaws
Date: 2005-12-22 00:21
I thought about that too.
Sabine Meyer's breath is less noisy than Emma Johnson's, IMO.
Lucy Lee Jang
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Author: Chalumeau Joe
Date: 2005-12-22 00:33
Chris P...I think you've isolated what I find most bothersome about it: her breathing frequently seems to occur in the wrong places.
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2005-12-22 00:42
It's all in the miking.
What I find annoying are clarinetists who leak air on recordings- that is terrible!
I have a Chicago Symphony recording (older) of Beethoven's 6th symphony which you can hear the principal flutists (Don Peck) tone ending in solos.
as in pffffffffft - really bad microphone positioning!
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2005-12-22 07:09
I guess I'm in the minority, since I don't mind the breath sounds at all.
Sfalexi wrote: "I think that's the way to go. No tricky uses of stereo or dolby 5.1 or 7.4 sound. Just one mic, as though you were one person sitting there at a live performance."
This is not correct. Mono is one of the most unatural ways to record. Stereo is not tricky, and is the best way to make it sound more natural. Unless you only have one ear, why do you think one microphone is more like "one person sitting there at a live performance"? The whole point of stereo is to copy how we hear, two ears, one in each side. Also, there are a lot of things in the way we hear a live concert that is not possible to copy in a recording, but a mono recording will make it much worse.
This is exactly some of what we learn in acoustic class, and our teacher, who has a master in math, physics, and music education, and a doctorat in musicology and music theory, and is now a professor from all the research she has done, mostly about acoustics and the physics in the music (I just want to give her the credit) talked about in our last lesson.
Post Edited (2005-12-22 07:23)
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2005-12-22 07:26
5.1, etc. are largely reserved for the realm of film and video games. Even then, the multitude of channels is used for sound effects, dialogue, etc. Music (acoustic, that is) is rarely more (or less) than two stereo channels. The plethora of microphones at a recording session will be mixed down to two channels for the final cut as the situation dictates.
I hear the breath sounds pretty heavily on recordings, but I also hear the "nyeeeaaaaooouuurrr" buzzy overtones of string sections, especially live in the concert hall.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2005-12-22 23:57
Clarnibass,
Yeah. After writing it, I thought about perhaps some sort of scenario with two microphones (left and right), each directed to pick up the sounds that our ears would respectively pick up and from those angles.
When I meant 'tricky' uses of stereo, I was thinking of certain songs (mostly of other genres than classical) where the sound will constantly fade from left to right to left to right or perhaps keep the drums on one side and the guitar on the other until they "decide" to mix them together.
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
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Author: Ed
Date: 2005-12-23 03:15
Oh,....I thought we were discussing the record by the Police, I was excited for a moment....never mind. Maybe that dates me.
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2005-12-23 07:27
It was the record that had most air-play of 1983 (in the UK), I would have thought that claim went to 'Karma Chameleon'.
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Author: Don Poulsen
Date: 2005-12-23 21:35
"Every Breath You Take"...I don't know how a song that sounds like it is from the perspective of a stalker could become so popular.
"Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you.
"Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you."
Creepy.
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2005-12-23 22:37
It's about the police watching a suspect.
Hence the few lyrics that denote it . . .
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
every bond you break
and the like
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
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Author: Brenda Siewert
Date: 2005-12-23 23:04
I hate hearing breath sucking. One of my professors was a real "wheezer." It was quite distracting. I also noticed Richard Stoltzman doing that on several CDs I have of his. Opening the mouth just a bit more and not keeping the lips "pursed" will help eliminate some of that noise.
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Author: Chalumeau Joe
Date: 2005-12-24 14:03
I discussed this post with some friends, and they pointed out that **I** make a lot of breath sounds, too...something that I hadn't been aware of. I think in my case, I'm just trying to play too much on a single breath...when I run out of gas is when I start to suck (...errr, that may not have come out right).
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2005-12-24 14:30
I still see people that have been playing for years breathing through their top teeth (by lifting their top lip) rather than dropping their jaw for a breath.
On oboe and cor I always (as do others) have to exhale before taking a new breath due to the high resistance, but the good thing with high resistance is that circular breathing is a doddle, but again I have to exhale through my nose and take a fresh breath, then the trick is starting the new breath seemlessly with the air that's held in the mouth.
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Author: BobD
Date: 2005-12-24 16:11
Nope, never bothered me any. Blame the recording engineer.
Bob Draznik
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Author: msloss
Date: 2005-12-26 01:49
Couple things:
Mono can be entirely natural, particularly for system listening vs. headphones. Some of the best recordings ever made, and I do mean ever, are in mono. No fancy tricks, not a lot of circuitry, just a beautiful sound. Playing it back with some vinyl, a needle, a couple wires, some valves and a Klipschorn, something to be experienced.
Stereo in and of itself is not necessarily a natural process. Your entire head is a transducer, and there are all kinds of intra-aural shenanigans going on. Some of the recordings using the Neumann dummy head are pretty remarkable when heard through headphones, but sound like crap over speakers. I won't get into the math here, but you have to impose a lot of signal processing to recreate an acoustic environment in an apparently authentic way, and only if you know everything about the recorded venue and the playback space. As engineers, all we can do is strive for a great sound and faithfully recreating the MUSICAL experience.
And everyone, climb down off your high horses about breath sounds. We play wind instruments, the operative word being "wind". Yes, some artists are louder than others when grabbing a breath, and circular breathers in particular can be quite noisy. When mic'ing, we can be sensitive to how mics are aimed to minimize that if placed in close proximity, but it just goes with the program. There is a lot of mechanical and biological noise that goes with playing any instrument when you listen up close. As Larry B. alluded, we train to fill a concert hall with sound, and mercifully the tone and timbre carries and leaves the little sounds (the scritchy sound of hair on string, air rushing through a tube, pedals clunking on a harp or piano) at the stage. If you place a mic inside the sphere where that sound carries, you are going to pick it up. That is not the natural listening position for any instrument. I'll wager very few of you have had the opportunity to hear Stoltzman from a distance of 24 inches. Singers are just as bad -- which is why we have to use pop filters, de-essers, comp/limiters, etc. to get the body noise out of the performance, including with Gordon Shumway, er, Mr. Sting. Well, there was the whole thing with the trampoline, too, but that's another thread.
Tell y'all what, record yourselves and see how you make out in that department.
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