String quartet!

[RaGe]

First time recording strings ... It was fun.

Piece 1

Piece 2

Piece 3

Sounds screetchy on my computer speakers ....sounded nice in the studio ... arghh.

Comments?

[NeoVXR]

would you like this one better for a percent or so ? just a quick hack only.

anything beyond a good hall and 2 brilliant mics in the right place means total re-creating.
so you need a very distinct vision what to create.

how many classic concerts have you visited, how many classic vinyls have you listened?

p1: just not played with clean pitch. will always sound somewhat painful. I would also ride the 1st violin a dB higher sometimes.
the instruments do not merge well into a nice section. very "digital".

p2: not so bad, because here is not so much need for a soft merge of all the instruments. the solo violin is the best part of your demo.

p3: better than p1.


what kind of room was it? I think there is too much reverb in the stuff. the fade-out/release at the end of p1 sounds very unnatural.
it was hard to find a healthy "attack" because of the reverb.

seems like you flattened the spectrum? can't do with strings.
I tried to reconstruct some "personality", but it is totally made up. I focussed on the violins so the cello is somewhat thin. this you might check out. my approach was oldfashioned playing style in european castles and the like..
the goal is not to make the sound better but to make listeners to love the music much more.

(please don't pick on the open-ness and high end. twice mp3 (lame) just does not do. also I don't process other than 44.1/16 for fun. but it rocks the boom box and you told it's the not-so-good system prob.)

keep on!
hope you got much time to train and experiment.

[RaGe]

Hey thx for you comments as usual.
I had a very small room to work with. Hence the "presence" ... The 1st violon and cellist were producing the session and wanted to hear more of themselves. And reverb ... I agree, much too much of it but hey, that's what the client wanted.
As far as mics/pres, I didn't have any transparent stuff so I had to make it work.
I didn't mess with EQ so the "flatened spectrum" you refer to is inherent to the preamps.
Thx for the mp3 ... yeah I have much time to experiment, I am just getting started

[NeoVXR]

ah, so it was the room and your equipment worked so fine, and the musicians had quite a good balance.
much of the lovely brightness of string sections comes from the concert room.
in this situation you could EQ the reverb to the needs.
maybe, HF roll-off of the reverb was too low and the pre-delay could be a few more msecs. I added some stereo delays, to provide for some early reflections. these are a broad area to experiment with strings, as we know.
also I played with the stereo panorama and balance.

another idea, if you are in experimenting:
you could test the sound of several versions you made (perhaps mine also ) when you throw parts/loops of the mix result in your sampling keyboard or softsynth and play it to some rap songs or rock ballad, and try how it sits in there ...

but I think you know it all, me lamer
just enjoyed to hear some classic music here!

[RaGe]

you're right ... my lack of familiarity with the genre shows ... however this is intended to be a demo for this quartet that does wedding gigs.

I see what you mean with the reverb and thanks for the tips man. They wanted more and more reverb, so I gave them reverb lol ...

Re: the group's balance .... the middle voices were over powering the 1st violin and cello .... at one point the 2nd violonist stops and asks the 1st: "Do you hear yourself? 'Coz I can't hear you" ... I was rofl ... So i tried to compensate by bringing up the spot mic on V1, hence the "presence" ...

I'll remix it and see what happens.