Fitzroid Quartet

Recording Session Notes

2018

The decisions taken before the recording of any sound will limit how music might be arranged. The following blog reports the decisions undertaken for the recording and mixing of the Fitzroy Quartet and gives an insight into some details of the recording session.

Who is Fitzroid Quartet?

The Fitzroy Quartet was formed at the Royal Academy of Music in 2014 by four awards winning musicians from different location across the EU. Their determination into music has made them winners of different awards and competitions including the Cavatina Intercollegiate Chamber of Music competition in 2016. Furthermore, the quartet had participated into several master classes and performances in the EU.

Instrumentation

3 cups

Blueberries

3 cups

Flour

1st Violin

1737 violin made by Carlo Antonio Testore

1½ cups

Butter

Cello

1843 cello by Henri Thouvenel.

2nd Violin

John Betts violin made c.1820

Viola

1763

Microphone Input List

This configuration uses the mid -side technique to capture the room and then has individual mics on the each instrument

Positioning approach

Floor Plan

There was no reverb on the raw recording from the original studio, which didn't complement the music particularly well, despite the recordings having a nice warm character. The piece needed a stronger character to give some 'bloom' to the work. Protools' D-verb incorporates a bright stereo reverb that wasn't suitable, and although it can run VST and DirectX plug-ins, I had nothing suitable in plug-in form. The reverbs provided in the DM1000 are very good — especially the REVX plug-ins — and can operate at 24-bit, 96kHz, but I had a particular Lexicon reverb in mind for this job, so I decided to use the Large Hall reverb set up at a medium decay to glue the overall mix.

The final stage was to perform an internal bounce of each edited stereo track, with reverb, and archive these bounces as WAV files, both in the original 24-bit/96kHz format, and as 24-bit/48.0kHz versions.