Organ recording with 9 microphones

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Performance, recording, calculation, programming by Stefan Kießling, 2022
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Korla Awgust Kocor (1822-1904): Finalsatz des Oratoriums „Israelowa zrudoba a tróšt / Israels Leid und Trost“

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St. Trinitatis Leipzig, Germany, is a very unique church, having the organ placed asymmetrically into the front left corner. Acoustically very tricky. Being player and recording artist in one person I did not find too much time to try out the best microphone positions, so I assembled a setup that gives me a lot of possibilities in post. I used:

• a small-AB setup on the gallery, in front of the organ with three pairs: Super-cardioids (ch. 1-2), omnis (3-4) and fig. of 8's facing outwards (5-6).
• a wide cardioid placed in the middle of that AB setup, a few centimeters shifted towards the organ (not to be seen in the picture), channel 7.
• a large-AB setup down in the nave with diffuse-field corrected omnis as room mics (ch. 8-9).

The three pairs mixed result in virtual microphones with a very wide range of arbitrary patterns and angles. Depending on the virtual pattern the main AB setups captures already a lot of reverb or is relatively dry. One point to achieve was to avoid, that the listener hears reverb coming more from the right side than from the left side. That can be balanced by using more room mics, especially on the left channel, but the result should not be too reverberant to keep the music clear and transparent.

You can mix and try out here by yourself. If your browser/your audio interface/your loudspeaker setup support surround sound, you can change the routing of the room mics to the surround speakers in the drop down list: Back Left and Back Right. The individual tracks are normalized by the mixer, which means, that the mixer behaves, as if all microphones have the same sensitivity and were recorded with the same preamp gain.

Equipment

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