In this week’s podcast, Julian is joined by Audrey Martinovich and Luke Goddard to discuss approaches and techniques for recording acoustic instruments and the musicians who play them.

Audrey Martinovich

Audrey Martinovich’s interest in recording was sparked from her background as a classically trained singer. She co-owns Audio for the Arts in Madison Wisconsin with her business partner, Buzz Kemper, where in addition to their acoustic music projects, they produce podcasts, radio shows, advertisements, and do post-production for film.

Luke Goddard

Luke Goddard is an engineer and musician who has been living with instruments, mics, consoles, tapes, and gear of all shapes and sizes since he first started playing music over 30 years ago in the days of Portastudios and MIDIVerbs. Away from Production Expert, Luke is a freelance recording and mixing engineer, videographer, and multi-instrumentalist for anyone with room on the bus

Talking Points

• Firstly let’s talk about capturing purely acoustic performances. Why not just put up a stereo pair and leave it at that?

• Although we aren’t just talking about purely acoustic instruments today, we can discuss instrument switch use amplification too, let’s briefly talk about the ‘normal’ acoustic instruments we’d expect to encounter in a band recording like acoustic guitars, drums and pianos. If these instruments are being used in a multitrack context with electric and electronic instruments is there a different approach which comes into play?

• What about positioning in the recording space and provision of foldback for acoustic players?

• What about polar pattern and phase?

• Classical players are culturally quite different from the rock and roll mentality. Any tips for someone recording classical for the first time? What about jazz or folk players?

• There’s a conventional wisdom which gets repeated often about mic choice, either type of particular models for particular instruments. Let’s look at those and comment on whether and when they are helpful.

• Last question. If you could only have one model of mic in your cupboard to cover anything which came in the door, what would it be?

Find Of The Week

Julian - Austrian Audio Hi-X65 Headphones

Luke - Arturai Minifuse 1

Audrey - Omni Sound Project’s Signal Gain Conference on Saturday November 6th, focused on welcoming marginalized genders into audio

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels