Triumphal March from 'Caractacus' - recording the organ

Recently I engineered a recording of Edwin Lamare's arrangement for solo organ of Edward Elgar's 'Triumphal March' from 'Caractacus'. The organ that was recorded is a 2-manual and pedal, 24 stop, pipe organ designed and built by the Kenneth Tickell and Company Ltd and is situated in St Laurence's Church, Upminster (UK).

For more information about the instrument itself follow the link below:

www.tickell-organs.co.uk/specInfo/opus52.htm

The Proposed Outcome

A lot of existing recordings of organ music have quite a heavy ambient and reverberant presence, often because of the natural acoustic of the buildings in which the instrument is housed. While I appreciate this, I am of the mindset that says get as clean (or dry) a recording as possible and if one desires more of the acoustic to be heard then add it post-recording. This may sound like blasphemy to some as the organ is often accentuated, maybe defined, by the acoustics of the building in which it is situated however it is a lot simpler to add the extra reverberation (and to a more precise degree) than it is to remove it if it is deemed unsatisfactory on the recording, not to mention it saves having to rearranging the microphone positioning.

I have covered the issue of reverberation and my approaches towards it in a post about convolution reverb and it was with some of these techniques that I acquired the impulse response of St Laurence's Church. The following was the plan and my intended process:

• Microphone Setup (positioning and levels)
• Record
• Track edit (takes, length, pan and fades)
• Processing and Effects (reverb, compression and EQ)

The intended sound was to feel as if one is close to the instrument, perhaps even playing it. Thus the microphones would be placed at a reasonably close distance (also to ensure a dry/wet ratio in favour of the dry).

The Recording

First of all, I would like to point out that I am limited to the equipment that is available to me and had to be very resourceful. I would hope that my technical understanding coupled with a bit of common sense has allowed me to produce the intended final recording, but that is for you to judge.

I made use of a large diaphragm condenser and two dynamic microphones which were positioned as follows:

• The single condenser microphone was placed centrally at a rough distance of 6ft from the exposed pipes
• The two dynamic microphones were situated to the left and right of the central condenser, respectively, and at a closer distance of 4ft. 

Three takes were recorded and the resulting audio chosen at the organists discretion (ultimately on the quality of the performance). It was also recorded around mid to late evening for logistical reasons although this did provide a better time to record as there was less unwanted background noise from traffic and the like. 

The Edit

Track editing was undertaken in order to organise the project and ensure there were no unwanted pre/post performance sounds that might have been picked up which included fade in and out at the start. This also avoided any clicks caused by cutting the audio off at a non-'zero crossing' point but in any case the project was set such that any cuts would automatically occur at a 'zero crossing'.

The two dynamic microphone tracks were panned left and right relative to their positions if one were playing the organ (see above) and lowered in level for balance. There isn't much directional information to obtain from an organ although the pipes seen at the front of the exposed face are designed and positioned to alternate chromatically eg. C1 - left, C#1 - right, D1 - left, D#1 - right...and so on. This is down to what is in essence 'air management' as a poor design would result in some pipes not sounding.   

The organ has such a wide frequency range, larger than the usual classical instruments, so any EQ that was applied was slight. The same can be said of any compression and I am not one for compressing the living daylights out of an instrument that doesn't have a touch sensitive 'attack'. As mentioned earlier the reverb was required but only slightly more than was naturally picked up. The three tracks were bussed to an auxiliary track with the 'Space Designer' plug-in and the previously captured impulse response of the building loaded in. There was greater control of the amount of reverb that could be applied and it still resulted in the recording accurately resembling the environment in which it was captured.    

It was remarked by the organist that the recording felt like it was almost inside the instrument which was unsurprising given my intentions how they affected the choices made.

The Recording

  

You can alternatively listen to this and more work including compositions on SoundCloud: 

Thank you for reading,

Jimmy.