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  4. EQing live recordings of strings

  • EQing live recordings of strings

    M
    M
    Someone has any experience to share this?

    How do strings have to be eq-ed to get that smooth warm cinematic strings sound?

    Any help appreciated [:)]
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD
    [:D] ! I always thought "real strings sound like real movies!?!

    Sorry, bad pun, but I couldn't resist.

    ****

    I don't know how "live" your live-recordings really are. Was it a "live"-ensemble in a studio, or an orchestra-gig on a stage? In the latter case, you will fight with the acoustic influences of the surroundings much more than with the actual sound of the instruments; I can't give you any serious advice for this scenario without listening to the material.

    Even in the case of a "clean" studio recording it depends a lot on the microphone-setup. Did you do a lot of close miking? Are there usefull main-sytems lile ORTF, Decca, or M/S? Do you have additional room-mics like spaced omnis?

    Most of the time you will have an exaggerated range from 2.5 to 4.5 kHz, maybe even 5 kHz. The closer you are to the instrument, the more this gets obvious. I would try to tame this hi-mids before doing anything else. It may happen that you will need both a boad dip with about 2 or 3 dB in this range, plus additional sharp filters for individual resonances.

    Everything else is very dependent on the material. Sometimes I love a bit of additional "air" on strings (i.e. a hi-shelve above 11 kHz, with 2-4 dB gain), and very often I reduce the boominess between 150 and 300 Hz, just to give you an idea.

    HTH,
    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • N
    N
    If you have access to a FIR processor like the Waves Linear Phase EQ, that can let you tranform the sound pretty radically without getting phasey sounds. At least, that's the case with sampled strings; I don't have experience eq-ing live strings.