Re: [ARSCLIST] How not to mike an orchestra

[Michael Shoshani <mshoshani@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Olhsson wrote:

> I got hired around ten years ago to record a woman who turned out to have
> played flute in both the NBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic where
> she met her husband who played clarinet. Before leaving, we sat down with
> the couple and had a conversation about the recording and broadcasting of
> those orchestras. After some wonderful anecdotes about Toscanini and
> Stokowski, I was shocked to hear them say they believed "recordings improved
> so much after the modern technique of using lots of microphones instead of
> only one started to be used."

About Stokowski, I can believe it. Remember, he was heavily involved in 
multiple-mic setups (all of four, I think) in early experimental stereo 
tests back in the 1940s, and he was an eager participant in Disney's 
"Fantasia", which was originally recorded on either seven or nine 
tracks, which were then mixed down to three audio tracks plus a control 
track. Toscanini, I am led to believe (by Roland Gelatt), was somewhere 
between ambivalent and downright antagonistic toward any recordings of 
his performances.

That being said, I will make the following observation which, as an 
amateur recordist with no professional training either in recording or 
in the maintenance of an orchestra, I admit to being unqualified to 
make: it seems to me that the conductor should have as little as 
possible to say in the sound of the finished recording. Why? Because the 
conductor only hears the orchestra from his own perspective on the 
podium. He never hears his own orchestra the way an AUDIENCE hears it in 
the hall, with the mass of sound waves mixed together and thrown forward 
due to the acoustic engineering, and THAT is the sound that was sought 
back in the single-mic or two/three mic pickup days. The engineer was 
after the sound that the record listener could identify from having been 
in an audience - not from the podium with the players between, say, 
three and fifteen feet away from their ears.

Michael Shoshani
Chicago