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Re: clarinet barrel mics

Author: fskelley
Date: 2015-08-27 21:16

Time for a bit more followup.

As I noted above and in other threads, I have done years of recording and live performances using my Shure SE110-based barrel mics. In testing years ago I found this method equal or better in sound quality to open room miking. Hard for me to remember now much detail of those tests, but I still have a pretty decent AT MB3000L dynamic mic I hadn't touched in years.

Any barrel mic is so well isolated from the outside world that feedback, or even unwanted outside sound, is just not a problem. Really, you might as well be working with the electronic output of a keyboard or guitar, it's that clean. Stand in front of a monitor?- no problem. Your full mix playing loudly in the room?- no problem. So I was happy to keep things this way for a long time.

But... I had begun to suspect I was losing clarinet tone quality this way. 1- because as much as I liked my recordings, they seemed to lack something compared to recordings posted by others. And 2- occasionally I would hear my own playing recorded by video camera or phone and think- hey, that sounds good.

So a couple of days ago I actually sat down with Sonar and did an A/B comparison between an audio clip from my usual method, and the audio from the corresponding video recorded from my DSLR, full of ambient noise (camera autofocus, computers, fan). And it was night and day, no question I have been missing a lot. I examined one particular D4 [D4]

- from the outside mic it had that wonderful "woody" overtone clarinet sound (funny because no wood in my clarinet) but from the barrel mic it was nothing special. Other notes maybe not so dramatic a difference, but overall a pretty big deal. And I don't think my A57's mic is anything to brag about.

So... my barrel mics are already disassembled and barrel holes plugged. I'm now recording with the MP3000L, wow does that sound better. I'm back to monitoring in headphones, dealing with ambient noise, and all that. Soon I'll be posting new samples and full recordings, all my old stuff is now obsolete. Fun, fun.

And I think an Apex565 clip-on condenser mic is in my future, I expect will cost about $115.

Perhaps the commercial varieties of barrel mic might do better than my converted earpieces. But I suspect the actual harmonic content from inside the barrel vs out in the room is what is at fault, rather than the performance of the transducer. In Sonar, I was unable to EQ even that single D4 from the barrel to sound anything like the D4 from the open room position.

Stan in Orlando

EWI 4000S with modifications

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clarinet barrel mics new

gregsquared

2005-04-25 02:02