What was your first (classical/acoustic) remote recording setup?

[loujudson]

Originally Posted by EV676

I recorded my high school's band concerts in the late 60's, probably with a couple of Shure Hi-Z ball mics. The first paying job was around 197
My effort actually got pressed onto vinyl. My name was on the record label as engineer! I remember getting my copy from the school band director, taking it home and listening to it. It sounded nothing like the master tape. It was compressed and eq'd to sound like bad AM Radio.
I hope the parents were happy.

No, I don't have the record anymore!

edited.
I guess I like audio.

Wow, we have some things in common, being old farts is part of it. My first Sony had magic eye meters too, very cool if inaccurate. But I was THRILLED to hear my work on vinyl! LRS did a marveous job on it, and it sounded better than the tape - couldn't even hear any hiss! Prepping it for mastering was very educational. I still use those primitive skills...

Lou

[Hornblower64]

Den Haag, Nederland
5 years ago
Set of 3 Nakamichi CM-300 SDC (omni/card caps)
MOTU 896HD
My wife's MacBook G4

[philper]

My sister's piano recital in 1967: a borrowed Wollensak tube mono tape recorder (at least several years old at that point, borrowed from a school), with the small dynamic mic that stored in the lid. I had a single transistor-radio style "earphone". The mic cable was about 3 feet long so I had to be right next to the piano. I took it all very seriously and made a pain in the ass of myself. Some things don't change. Yes, there was an argument about paying for the tape.

Philip Perkins

[Lazerface]

2006. Foothills Brass Quintet, I knew one of the trumpet players and he gave me a good chance to start out. NT5 in xy to a Presonus Firepod to laptop. After that show, I remembered to never stop recording once the concert starts, cuz anything can and will happen! Oh, and 25ft back from the stage is not a great mic position

With luck, I've gotten some more work since, and hope to eventually add some better mics to my locker. The NT5's have done a great job for me so far, but I want moar!

[4blades]

In the first times:
a crappy fostex d-5, neumann k-184 mic pair.

Then moved to:
Qes labs Smp-2, DPA 4011-tl pair, Prism AD-2

[mpdonahue]

First setup was a Revox B77 with a home made preamp and a pair of AKG451's (With the windscreens because they were Soooo bright).
Quickly upgraded to a pair of Km-83's with and additional pair of KK84 capsules and a PCM-F1 with a pair of SL2000's. Used that rig for probably 4 or 5 years till I started at Soundmirror...
Funny enough I was cleaning out the attic last week and found the printout of my accounting for the first year of recording. I came out $587 in the hole......

All the best,
-mark

[hbphotoav]

First "pro" gig (leading to a second, btw...) was a Christmas album for Highland Baptist Church in Waco TX in 1976. Teac A3340S @15ips; Sony C55FET main pair; two Primo pencil mics for solos; weak link: Peavey 800s stereo mixer. But... like I said, it led to a second album four years later. Same main pair, with Beyer M500s for the solos, through a decent little Yamaha PM430. Both were recorded direct to stereo main tracks... the second album was recorded with choir and organ first, then the church orchestra was tracked, also direct to stereo, and mixed down to a Teac A3300.

Then I moved to Ohio to be a photographer, doing mainly board mixes for the little gospel country and bluegrass bands I mixed on the weekends. Still have the C55FETs and the A3340S, but have moved to DAV/Apogee/Logic and Sennheiser/Gefell/DPA main pairs.

HB

[mathieujm]

In 1980, a Teac K7 recorder + an Uher mixer + 2 BST mics (then Primo).
I found that my K7 recorder was producing less noise (with Dolby) than the B77 of my best friend.
But it was so difficult to have some stability from one K7 to another ! Like a pro, I was tuning my recorder with the K7 to be used before each serious concert recording. Not easy with a two heads machine !
The revolution came later with the DAT.

JMM

[Mark A. Jay]

Microphone: Neumann KU 100.

Recorder: iRiver iHP-140.

[zoom]

early '90s, very beginning:
a Sony DAT Walkman (TCD-D3), Neumann BS48i power supply and a pair of Gefell UM70s mics which feeded the Sony's mic-preamps asymmetrically.

But the equipment was growing soon, the setup above was not very reliable... with a DA30-MK II and a Behringer PreQ mic 502 and still the UM70s Mics.
Have still all of these things and (exept of the Gefell Mics from time to time) this equipment is not in use anymore.

[Teddy Ray]

Originally Posted by mpdonahue

First setup was a Revox B77 with a home made preamp and a pair of AKG451's (With the windscreens because they were Soooo bright).
Quickly upgraded to a pair of Km-83's with and additional pair of KK84 capsules and a PCM-F1 with a pair of SL2000's. Used that rig for probably 4 or 5 years till I started at Soundmirror...
Funny enough I was cleaning out the attic last week and found the printout of my accounting for the first year of recording. I came out $587 in the hole......

All the best,
-mark

Mark, how did you get the soundmirror gig? You guys did the Living Stereo remasters didn't you? You still have those Siltech Cables and the Fancy Aria outfitted studer?

very jealous of that gig, man. That must have been amazing hearing those masters.....

[JonesH]

Originally Posted by Mark A. Jay

Microphone: Neumann KU 100.

Recorder: iRiver iHP-140.

That's not the most common combo, I wager! Mind telling us how you ended up with that in particular?

I think I should say my first setups were from my school so I guess a nice mixture of SoundDevices SD702 for 2ch recording, a Tore Seem broadcast mixer with nice pre's and atrocious amounts of oxidation, a lot of nice mics from the school (DPA/Neumann).

[mpdonahue]

Originally Posted by Teddy Ray

Mark, how did you get the soundmirror gig? You guys did the Living Stereo remasters didn't you? You still have those Siltech Cables and the Fancy Aria outfitted studer?

very jealous of that gig, man. That must have been amazing hearing those masters.....

Teddy,
I got my job at Soundmirror the old fashioned way.... I started as an unpaid intern, kept my eyes open and my mouth shut and did good work. Eventually got hired as a tech and from there worked my way up to where I am today. I had the opportunity to have a couple of great engineers take a liking to me and request me on their recordings. This gave me the opportunity to see how some the icons of the industry made records. They took me under their wing and spent the time to explain to me their philosophies and techniques for making recordings and I had the opportunity to see these ideas in action. From there it's just like the old saying... You steal from the best and make up the rest...
As far as Living Stereo- I mastered the entire SACD catalog. Yea, it was really interesting going through all the different masters from all the different periods of Living Stereo. From the original test recordings in Boston in 1954-5 through the Three-Track Stereo there was a steady progression in the methods of recording for stereo and each engineer had their own concept and style.
The thing to remember that up until 1959, most of the stereo recordings were engineering exercises, with very few released on 1/4" stereo tape. Most weren't released until after stereo LP came into being in 1959.
All the best,
-mark

[Mark A. Jay]

Originally Posted by JonesH

That's not the most common combo, I wager! Mind telling us how you ended up with that in particular?

Well, it was a matter of circumstance. I had the mannequin head with me when visiting an old friend / colleague on a sort of road-trip. Some friends of his were in a community orchestra and had asked him about being recorded. At the time I had an RDAT recorder that decided it no longer had any interest in operating. So...I ended up using my friend's iRiver iHP-140 at the last second, and it worked quite well.

I liked the iRiver so much that I opted to buy one, and then replaced its hard drive with a larger variant. I thought that for the money, it was hard to beat (optical digital I/O, analog, built in memo-mic, universal FM tuner) and had the advantage of looking like any external USB drive - I didn't want to be forced to use any management software such as iTunes, Media Player etc.

Anyway, I used that recorder a few times after that (with varying results) simply because I was either situationally short of gear or was experiencing other equipment failures.

As they say... "any port in a storm".

[Teddy Ray]

Originally Posted by mpdonahue

Teddy,
I got my job at Soundmirror the old fashioned way.... I started as an unpaid intern, kept my eyes open and my mouth shut and did good work.

Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it very much. What a pity it is that this sort of "working up the ranks" or "master/student" dynamic is absent today..

[mpdonahue]

Originally Posted by Teddy Ray

Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it very much. What a pity it is that this sort of "working up the ranks" or "master/student" dynamic is absent today..

I would tend to disagree with this. There are still places that you can get this same kind of situation. The problem is that there are WAY too many people out there that go to an 8 week course and think that they know everything that they need to know to be a master at the craft.
Of the 7 people that we've hired here at Soundmirror in the last 20 years, 5 of them were interns at one point.
The trick is to find a place where people are doing real work at a very high level and learn the craft.

All the best,
-mark

[WVUtubadude]

Originally Posted by Teddy Ray

Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it very much. What a pity it is that this sort of "working up the ranks" or "master/student" dynamic is absent today..

I make a pretty good cup of coffee

[fifthcircle]

I went through the apprenticeship route as well... It isn't quite dead yet.

I worked for somebody without pay for 2 or 3 years after I got out of college. I knew music and performance well by that point and needed to learn higher end audio. I was a completely amateur, but a couple engineers here in LA let me work with them and learn the way to (and not to) deal with the industry. From there, I took a low-paying job working for another engineer where I got another view on how to work.

Even as a "professional," I have taken the opporunity to learn from others. I've assisted for some pretty amazing engineers and just talking shop with them has turned me on to possibilities that I never would have seen before. The collective knowledge here on GS has just been another avenue for me to trade and learn new ideas.

--Ben

[boojum]

Originally Posted by fifthcircle

I went through the apprenticeship route as well... It isn't quite dead yet.

I worked for somebody without pay for 2 or 3 years after I got out of college. I knew music and performance well by that point and needed to learn higher end audio. I was a completely amateur, but a couple engineers here in LA let me work with them and learn the way to (and not to) deal with the industry. From there, I took a low-paying job working for another engineer where I got another view on how to work.

Even as a "professional," I have taken the opporunity to learn from others. I've assisted for some pretty amazing engineers and just talking shop with them has turned me on to possibilities that I never would have seen before. The collective knowledge here on GS has just been another avenue for me to trade and learn new ideas.

--Ben

The pro end of this still seems to very much be a guild. A lucky few are admitted to learn. And by the same rules as in the Middle Ages - humility and little or no wages - can be admitted to higher and higher circles of learning. From what I have been able to gather there is stuff going on out in the field that is just not covered in textbooks. The black art and magic of superb recordings, learned from wizards.

Not having access to any of this in my location has not diminished my interest or zeal. It does make progress slow and irregular. While often frustrating it is always a joy to wind up with something that sounds good.