Pipe Organ and Acoustic Guitar in the same hall?

[pazmusik]

Friends & engineers,

I've read with great interest the posts already in existence here on pipe organ recording techniques. There's a lot of good information around.

What I'm faced with here is a situation where I need to record a piece written for pipe organ and acoustic guitar, in the same hall.

The hall is here: http://www.stetson.edu/music/facilities/

The questions are:

1. Should I even try to record both at the same time, or track the organ then overdub the guitar? Obviously for classical/concert pieces like this one, performances are far more natural if they're live and one-take, not overdubbed.

2. Where do I place the guitarist? Depending on what mic I use on him, how far must he be from the omnis tracking the organ? Should I face the guitar mic away from the ranks?

3. What techniques during recording will yield the best results?

My gratitude and thanks in advance for your attention and time in figuring this out with me. Please help!

- paz

[hughesmr]

Hi Paz,

I did exactly this when I recorded the CD "Pops and Pipes" back in 2004. The guitar/organ work I recorded was the Larghetto Cantabile of Richard Purvis. The CD is available here:

Pops & Pipes: Yun Kyong Kim Plays in Dayton, Ohio

We recorded the musicans live at the same time a la "performance mode". Since the majority of the disc was organ solo works (although there are a couple of pieces with cello), I wanted to maintain the same sonic perspective for the organ throughout. The difficulty was that the organ was a gallery installation, and the guitarist needed to be in the gallery next to the organist (and organ) to maintain musical cohesion and line of sight. A spot on the guitar tended to introduce organ bleed, making the organ sound inconsistent between this piece and others on the program.

Our ultimate solution was to have the guitarist very subtlety amplified (he is a well-known professional acoustic guitarist in the midwest, and brought his own acoustic guitar amp), placing the amp on the gallery rail. This was done for both the CD recording as well as a live concert performance. It did maintain what I'd call an honest perspective to the guitar sound, not making it as big or fat as the organ sound.

I'm sure with more time and budget, we could have been able to successfully spot the guitar acoustically for the recording, but the reverberant environment, the breadth of the organ sound, the fact that we only had the guitarist for an hour (!) and necessities of musician placement did make it difficult. In retrospect, a fig8 spot with the main organ in the null might have been the ideal solution, but alas, I had no fig8 or ribbons at my disposal at the time. The recording ended up using only 2 Earthworks omnis as spaced mains.

[pazmusik]

Excellent, Michael! Thanks... I had not considered the option of a clean acoustic guitar amp. I'm going to experiment with that.

Just out of curiosity, wouldn't even a fig8 mic, even with the organ in the null, pick up bleeding from all the reflections around such a live hall?

Cheers,
paz

[hughesmr]

Originally Posted by pazmusik

Just out of curiosity, wouldn't even a fig8 mic, even with the organ in the null, pick up bleeding from all the reflections around such a live hall?

Yes, but not as much as I would get from the wider patterns I had on hand at the time. Good luck!

[Corran]

Michael, is there a demo of that CD anywhere? I'd like to hear it.

[Piedpiper]

I would try a Crown SASSP capturing both with the guitar about 3 feet in front of the guitar centrally located to the pipes, and use a separate close spot mic on the guitar just for the headphones for the organist to hear the guitar with no latency. I hope that sentence is not too confusing.

[Audiop]

pazmuik,

how big is that hall?


/Peter

[pkautzsch]

So, the music is written for guitar and organ? That means it is to be played and recorded simultaneusly, no dubs. If it's well written, the organ isn't too loud when the guitar is important.
I see two main problems here:
1. the sound people expect from an organ recording is quite different from what people expect a guitar recording to sound like. If your main pair is great for the organ, it will probably be way too far out to be a good guitar main pair. So you'll need to find a way to make the guitar main pair not pick up too close an organ sound.
Fig-8 mics seem the key to guitar spot miking here. Keeping the LF room response out too.

2. Players need to hear each other well enough, and probably see each other too.
That means the guitarist will sit quite close to the organist.
But there he won't hear the organ like one is used to hear an organ, so it might need some time for him to get comfortable with that. Actually, you hear a few pipes very close, and others are very diffuse, and sometimes it's the C you hear well and the C# you don't hear at all as the pipe is located on the other end of the organ.

If the desk is not right in the middle of the organ, but remote and maybe even mobile, this might help a lot both in organ bleed and in hearing each other.

If the guitar has a piezo out, I'd definitely go and record that on a separate channel too. You can't get a cleaner spot mic.