Audio Engineering Course: Trinity Church Live Recording

Our Audio Engineering students had the pleasure of putting the skills they have learned so far into action at Sacred Trinity Church.

Audio Engineering Tutor Chris Kolev gives his take

My Audio Engineering Course students and I were working on a cover version of ‘Nine Inch Nails – Every Day Is Exactly The Same’ and the song opens with a lovely piano introduction which we wanted to capture in all its beauty, the idea I had was to record that in a church.

Thankfully the lovely people at Sacred Trinity Church were kind enough to let us use the piano they have at the church and even closed the place down for a few hours so no one could interrupt the session.

‘’The idea was to show the class how to capture high-quality sound using a portable rig that doesn’t take up much space and is easy to take with you on the go.’’

The idea was to show the Audio Engineering Class how to capture high-quality sound using a portable rig that doesn’t take much space and is easy to take with you when on the go. For the session, we used a laptop running Pro Tools 2018.5 connected to a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 which provided all the ins and outs we needed for the session.

The microphones were a matched pair of Aston Starlight small diaphragm condenser microphones that have a very clean and balanced sound and were great for capturing the beautiful timbre of the piano.

We have experimented with different stereo micing techniques which included an XY, A/B spaced pair, and a Mid/Side. In the end, we went with the A/B and included two Audio Technica AT2050 microphones in an omnidirectional polar pattern as room mics, placed at different distances from the piano to capture a natural short and long-time reverbs. For playback, we all had to be on headphones because there is no isolated room to serve as a control room.