| this is from an interview to Geoff Emerick... i think he got the best from a sitar ever...
Were you puzzled the first time you had to record a sitar?
[Laughs] No, because I’d worked with other instruments on sessions, and had been listening to the tones and where the sounds came from. The sound of the sitar was so quiet and complex. I think I used Neumann 54s or 56s, which are really nice condenser mics—little tubes you could get right close onto the strings or the soundboard, then probably through a Fairchild, to get this amazing big wall of huge sound.
After that, Ravi Shankar came in and was doing a classical recording in Number 3. And George Harrison, who was friends with him, said to me, “Do you want to come in and see Ravi? Because something’s not quite right.” Well, they had him wired up on a wooden rostrum, and they had a ribbon mic, a 4038, about twenty feet up in the air. And of course, you couldn’t hear anything; he was getting more room than sitar, which was just kind of mush in the background. I was just the young kid and the engineer had been there years and years, so I had to be a bit diplomatic. |