Records & Recording: Less Is More, By Max Wilcox (Vol.1, No.5: Winter 1977/78)

Editor's Note: Max Wilcox, our absentee Associate Editor, is back at last, with further evidence of his evolution from Establishment producer and organization man to free-lance independent and reborn audio purist. That little bulge you see under his jacket is yet another Grammy award, this time for reproducing Rubinstein's astonishing farewell album of Beethoven and Schumann piano works. (Eat your hearts out, all you direct-to-disc producers of The Saint Stanislas High School Band and other audiophile goodies.) The article that follows isn't exactly a sequel to his two previous ones, but we'll let him explain why.

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Less Is More

By Max Wilcox

This article was originally to have been the third of the series on why records sound the way they do, and was to have taken a recording session from its conception to the final test pressing. A lot of it has been written and we should get to it in the next issue. In the meantime something much more pertinent to this publication has been happening in my studio work, and since there has been time to experiment, record, mix and evaluate the final results, I'd like to tell you what happened.

Last fall I embarked on two full weeks of recording for New World Records at Columbia's 30th Street studio. The week following the New World sessions I moved across town to RCA's Studio A for four sessions of Brahms piano music, played quite extraordinarily by Richard Goode for Desmar Records, and the remainder of the week was devoted to Tashi playing Mozart and Beethoven trios. I can say without exaggeration that, aside from the exceptional music-making that took place, these were probably the most technically provocative weeks 1 have ever spent as a record producer.

What could cause all this excitement after eighteen years of producing records? Well, it all had to do with microphones and microphone placement. And it had to do with--don't faint--less rather than more. In fact, the vast majority of the recordings made were recorded with only a pair of omnidirectional Schoeps / Studer 'Colette' microphones. In the case of the Mozart and Beethoven trios recorded by Tashi, a pair of Cambridge C-5 ribbon micro phones were added to the omni pair, for the cello and clarinet in the Beethoven and the viola and clarinet in the Mozart, to achieve an even greater degree of warmth and natural ness in the reproduction of those instruments.

The first session during which I tried the omni pair was for a record called New Virtuoso Music, Vol. II for New World Records (the American music recording company funded by the Rockefeller Foundation). The performers were Harvey Sollberger (the avant-garde composer and virtuoso flutist) and the vibraphonist Claire Hendricks. The work was a piece by Sollberger called "Sunflowers" and it was scored for alto flute, flute, piccolo and vibraphone. The various flutes, all played by Sollberger, were used in alternating sections of the music, so there was great range of color and dynamics from this duo of instrumentalists.

The microphones were placed about six feet apart at a height of seven feet and the players were about five feet away from the microphones. After listening to the players re hearse in the hall I walked into the studio to hear how it sounded over the microphone setup.

Would the presences of the instruments match, would there be enough separation, would the omni pattern sound too diffuse? All of these questions ran through my mind. How did it sound? Terrific! Sollberger listened to a short test and said it sounded better than he thought he sounded in the hall. IT had carefully placed the two performers about 3: feet apart, which meant that the flute was essentially in front of the left microphone and the vibraphone was in front of the right microphone. Because of the omnidirectional pattern of the microphones both players had a full stereo pickup, yet the flute was clearly left of center and the vibraphone was solidly right of center. Any disparities in presence could be corrected by moving the players until the balance and presence were correct.

"Sunflowers" was completed to everyone's satisfaction and after lunch we returned to the studio to record a work by Robert Morris called "Motet on Do-dah". It is scored for flute, piano and double bass, and was played by Sollberger, Daniel Shulman, piano, and Donald Palma, double bass. Aha! Much more complicated balance problems. It was clearly a prime candidate for a fancy multimike setup.

Well, I didn't weaken! We moved the players around (being careful to keep the flute in the same position and perspective as in the morning), removed the lid from the piano, and added one omni microphone about three feet from the double bass (panned on the console to correspond to his position in the group). The results were again wonderfully natural. The additional omni on the bass did not make the bass sound louder or more present than the others, but only served to correct the balance. A cardioid (directional) microphone on the bass would have brought him forward and spoiled the naturalness and depth. Again the players were delighted with the results, which is rather rare in chamber music recordings where the balances are so delicate and each player tends to feel his pickup could be just a little clearer, just a little more present.

The following week's New World sessions were performed by a New York early-music ensemble called the Federal Music Society, playing American music of the Federal period on antique instruments (not reproductions).

There were woodwind septets, quintets and trios, in addition to works for violin and piano, piano solo, and voice and piano. It was quite a unique opportunity to try purist microphone techniques on a wide variety of instrumental and vocal combinations, and I was frankly fascinated to see how it was all going to work.

Needless to say, I had a small army of microphones close at hand in case this more than-a-little suspicious technique didn't really work. Well, it worked. The lesson I had learned the previous week was as simple as: move the players until it sounds right and only add an extra microphone when a balance really cannot be corrected any other way.

First we recorded several pieces for 30 piece orchestra and chorus. The orchestra was picked up by an omni pair left and right in front of the orchestra, an omni pair on the woodwinds and an omni pair on the chorus of 12 singers who were placed behind the wood winds. If the chorus had been larger, they would have needed less microphone help, but 12 singers cannot dominate a 30-piece orchestra without their own pickup.

The next day we recorded the various small chamber groups, and I never used more than two omni microphones, with an occasional single helper microphone on a double bass or snare drum.

The major undertaking was a recording of an opera, a delightful curio from the early 19th century called The Ethiop by Raynor Taylor. Now three vocal soloists were added to our orchestra and chorus. Here we used an omni pair for the general orchestra pickup and a 12-foot-high pair of Schoeps/Studer cardioids for the woodwinds. The helper micro-

phones we had put up for the double bass and percussion section proved to be unnecessary and were not used. The chorus, which was several feet behind the orchestra on risers, was recorded with another omni pair of Schoeps/Studers. As I mentioned, choruses are notoriously difficult to balance with an orchestra, and from the conductor's podium in the studio the chorus sounded very far away. Using an omni pair about 11 feet high in front of the 12-voice chorus allowed us to establish a balance and yet keep a similar perspective on the overall sound of chorus and orchestra. The vocal principals were placed about 10 feet to the rear of the conductor and sang, facing the orchestra, into their own stereo pair of cardioid Schoeps/Studers. The micro phones were about 3: feet apart and the singers were about 5 feet away. The distance ensured a spacious vocal pickup and the directional pattern (with the dead side of the microphone facing the orchestra) gave us adequate control over orchestral leakage into the soloists' micro phones. If time had permitted we would have experimented with placing the soloists beside the conductor, but we had three sessions for a great deal of music, and regardless of their physical position the vocalists needed their own microphones. Actually, in recording sessions, vocal soloists are almost never recorded in concert position (beside the conductor) because a separate pickup gives the engineer and producer much more control over the balance and eliminates the problem of orchestral leakage into the vocal microphones.

Well, the following week I got to deal with that problem too. After finishing the New York recordings, I flew to Chicago to produce the audio for Unitel/Munich as they videotaped three new programs with Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony. These programs are shown all over the world, and in most large cities the sound is simulcast in FM stereo over a local FM station.

During that week we taped an all-Strauss program (including Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel and the Four Last Songs sung by Lucia Popp), a Russian program of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and the Shostakovich Symphony No. 1, plus an hour long program of the major orchestral pieces from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet.

All right, now what was I going to do with microphones? Last year the Solti/Unitel programs were made with 14 to 16 Neumann U-87 microphones and Sir Georg was delighted with the sound. How could I use my experience of the previous weeks to improve upon the sound, without compromising the control necessary to match the sound to the ever changing close-up pictures of various orchestral sections that flash across the screen? These pictures must be supported by sound that bears some relationship to the image seen by the eye, and yet one cannot break up the sound into a series of close-up recordings of the orchestra that have no overall perspective and homogeneity. My solution has been to balance the orchestra the same way I would in a regular recording session and, if all the instrumental perspectives are right, the picture can do whatever it likes without ever seeming to be unsupported by the sound. A screen solely occupied by a snare drum playing softly must be accompanied by a clear recording of that drum, yet the drum must still retain its proper place toward the back of the orchestra in the overall audio perspective. Hence last year's 14 to 16 microphones.

The question was what microphones from last year's setup could be eliminated without losing the control necessary to support the video images. Well, first there was the problem of the hall. Orchestra Hall Chicago today bears little resemblance to the hall of Reiner's famous recordings. It was "modernized" in 1967 by the acousticians who gave you New York's original Philharmonic Hall, and its glories are but fond memories. In other words it has little resonance or luster, and filled with 3,000 people (as it is at the special concerts performed for Unitel's cameras) it becomes a definite recording challenge.

While still retaining the microphone setup features that had pleased Solti the previous year, I began to eliminate microphones. In rehearsal we found the timpani sounded best without a separate microphone, and the double basses sounded best picked up by the overall microphone on their side of the stage. There had been four omni microphones out in the hall the previous year and these were replaced by one cardioid pair facing into the hall. So now we had a percussion microphone and a harp and-piano microphone as the only spot micro phones. The remainder of the sound (all re corded this season by Schoeps/Studer micro phones) was picked up by an omni pair left and right at the edge of the stage and 11 feet high, a cardioid pair 10 feet above the wood winds, and a cardioid pair over the second violins and violas. In the Four Last Songs, Lucia Popp was recorded by an omni pair about 5 feet away, and panned full left and right to preserve the stereo image of the orchestra being recorded on the main micro phones. The famous Chicago brass certainly needs no separate microphone to immortalize its stentorian tones, so we had a total of 12 microphones. The percussion and harp/piano pickup were used only during special solo passages, so essentially the sound was re corded by 10 microphones. Still multimike to be sure, but far fewer than are commonly used these days in orchestral recordings.

Os special interest was the cardioid pair facing into the hall that replaced the previous season's four omnis. Mixed at full level with the main microphones, they gave more spaciousness to the sound than we dared hope.

I first tried this hall microphone technique (which had been used for years by DGG Tonmeister) during a Philadelphia Orchestra/ Unitel television production in June, and it made the Academy of Music sound very spacious. Not lushly resonant, mind you, but certainly spacious and un-constricted. This technique captures the reflections off the auditorium walls as they are returning to the stage in their longest period of decay.

Since the acoustic personality of any hall is determined by a combination of direct sounds from the stage and reflections from the walls, microphone setups that do not capture hall reflections in true proportion cannot accurately reproduce the acoustics as actually experienced within the hall. Using distant hall microphones pointed toward the stage gives a full, resonant pickup, but it also creates a time blur because the direct sounds recorded by these hall microphones arrive 35 or 40 milliseconds after they have been recorded by the stage microphones.

The cardioids turned away from the orchestra and into the hall record only the reflections as they are heard from the stage, and the arrival time of direct sounds is therefore not upset.

This technique, first tried in Philadelphia, was equally effective in the similar dry acoustics of a packed Orchestra Hall. Both the Ormandy and Solti programs will have been 62 telecast and simulcast by the time you read this. The sound you heard was not compressed or equalized in any way during my mix made from multitrack tape to two-channel stereo, and those of you who heard these programs in good FM stereo simulcasts heard a dynamic range not usually expected from a made-for television production.

Since both Solti and Ormandy are under long term contract to Unitel, I will have a yearly chance to make what I hope will be increasingly natural and technically sophisticated recordings. Coincidental (crossed pairs) microphone techniques were first written about by Alan Blumlein in the early 1930's, long before stereo became a commercial reality. Since his theories are based on phase coherence, which in turn is based on fundamental laws of acoustics, it is highly appropriate that many people,are reinvestigating his techniques. Many of the Sheffield Lab recordings are based on coincidental microphoning, and my next project will be my own series of experiments with this technique. Schoeps is now preparing to market a special flat-frequency-response capsule (similar to the omnis and cardioids referred to here) in the figure-eight configuration on which Blumlein based his theories. Since I prefer omni microphones to cardioids, I have been hesitant to get my feet wet in coincidental microphoning. Omnidirectional microphones produce wonderful mono when used in coincidence, since they do not possess the directionality upon which coincidental microphoning is based.

Figure eight gives you a cardioid-like pickup both to the front and rear, so the hall pickup of an omni is approached while still retaining directionality in front.

Of course my much-favored Cambridge ribbon microphones are figure eight, so per haps what I really needed was a little mental stimulation to move briskly from the convenient to the possible! This summer I'll try some coincidental microphoning on the annual Ormandy - Philadelphia/Unitel production, and I'll report the results on these pages.

Since this article actually started to be written aeons ago as a history of a Tashi recording session, you can see how far things went astray. I promise in the next issue to tell what happened there, and how we went through the various steps that will result in an April release on RCA Red Seal.

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[adapted from TAC]

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