AaronFW wrote:
I am currently looking at recording equipment to record myself in order to listen to myself to get a better idea of how others perceive my playing. Does anyone else do this currently? If so, what equipment are you using?
I have a little experience in audio and video recording from a Graduate class that I took on the topic. Right now I am looking at using an SM57, an XLR-to-USB adapter, my MacBookPro, and probably a good set of Sennheiser headphones (HD 280 Pro, maybe?).
Also, because it is related and since Ben Hall reads most (all?) posts anyways: Ben can you tell me a little about what recording equipment you used in recording Tonight at Paddy Mac's? I've been able to listen to it a little bit and I enjoy the quality. One nice thing I enjoy is the left and right balance: I was using earbuds and found that I could take one ear out and just focus on one musician at a time, it was kind of fun. Other than that, it seems like you guys had a decent setup and I was curious as to what recording equipment you used.
Ah well, now, we had a professional recording engineer and LOTS of mikes, baffle boards, and stuff I didn't understand. Basically a full recording studio setup in an abandoned farmhouse in northern Italy.
One thing that I think made a big difference is that there were mikes set up to catch sound that a listener would hear, in natural circumstances, but which ordinary mortals like me wouldn't normally think of when recording. So, for instance, there was a big mike behind the back of my fiddle and also one up near the - relatively high - ceiling, to catch the sound coming up from the fiddle. I remember a mike right on the floor underneath Greg (the piper). As well as the multiple mikes on each instrument, there were a couple away from us as players, catching the ambient (have I got the meaning right?) sound in the studio.
After all of that, our engineer, Michele, is, IMO, very good indeed at mixing, the object of that being to recreate the actual sound we made in the studio.
I'm afraid I don't know what mikes Michele (appropriate name!

) used, although I do know that he used several different types and makes of mike.
As you can probably tell, I am a bit of an ignoramus when it comes to the equipment. I know my fiddle, I know my whistles, and I know my flute. That's as much as my brain will hold.
