Flute Video Lesson: How to Sound Great when Recording the Flute

Hello. This is Erin, back for another video on virtual sheet music. I'm really excited for today's video, because we're going to learn all about how to sound our best recording flute. My first tip may seem pretty basic, but it's really important, which is to eliminate as much extra noise as possible. That means you might have to turn off your AC or your heat. You might need to banish your cat to another room, make sure you're not wearing a loud, jangly bracelet or anything like that. If you have sticky keys, take care of those before you record. These are all really basic things, but if you just think about them and put a little bit of effort there, your recording will sound much better.

Step two, mike placement. This is going to depend on what kind of microphone you have, and also if you're recording video and audio on the same device. For example, if you're using your phone to record your audio and your video, then you're going to have to make a trade off between your mic sound and your video quality. I usually, if I'm editing videos that people have recorded and sent me, I will ask them to record a little bit further away from themselves because a lot of the mic distortion we get on phones just comes from the levels being too loud, from the phone being too close to you. If you listen to a recording of yourself from your phone and it sounds really thuddy, then that just means that your recording device was too close to you, and the levels were too loud for the microphone.

There's no way that I know of to adjust your levels just using the camera app on your phone. If you're only recording audio on your phone, I like the app RecForge because it does let you bump your levels down and then you can record pretty great audio just on your phone. If you have a detached, a separate microphone, the best place you for most kinds of microphones to place for flute is about two feet in front of you about halfway down the body of the flute, so somewhere around your G sharp key, and ideally it's a little bit above you and angled down. For me right now on my separate microphone, it's on a music stand really close to where my phone is, but it's a little bit higher up and tipped down towards me.

If you're getting too much of an airy sound in your microphone, you need to move the microphone further towards the foot joint. If you have the mic too close to the head joint, it'll sound harsher and you'll hear more of just the straight up air sound coming from your mouth. Let's look at how Mike placement affects the sound. This is my ideal mic placement I just described. Definitely factor in your room acoustics, too. If you're in a really boomy room, it might need to be closer to you, or if you're in a dry room, you can place it further away. For piccolo the microphone should be further away from you, and for low flutes it should be a little bit closer.

Now, if you're going to invest in a microphone, what the heck should you get? I know. It's like completely overwhelming. Before COVID, I took some sound recording classes at my local library, which were super helpful. I haven't invested in all of the technology that I could have after that class, because it does get really expensive really quickly, but I did get a Blue Snowball iCE microphone. This is super cheap. It's 40 or 50 bucks, so that's like as cheap as a decent microphone gets. It looks like this. It comes with a little stand. Until now, the audio you had been hearing was from this, but since I'm holding it, it would sound really weird. But, this is a great little microphone.

Now I'll play a scale of one time, but you'll hear it twice ... once from my phone microphone and once for my Blue Snowball iCE microphone. If you want just a little microphone that can plug straight into your computer, that's a great one to get. When picking a microphone, it's really important to know the range acoustically of the flute in hertz. That means the lowest sound wave we can make and the highest sound wave we can make. The flute's going to go from about 200 hertz to about 12,000 hertz, so it's a pretty wide range. If you get a microphone that's going to cut out the high end, that's going to make you sound really bad.

For flute, if you're going to go all out, a ribbon microphone is wonderful. They will give you a really nice full, dark sound that's probably the closest to what hearing a flute in-person would sound like, but they're quite expensive and there's some of the most fragile microphones. Only go for a ribbon microphone if you're super serious about this. The Avantone CR-14 is a really great ribbon microphone for flute. A condenser microphone will be great for most people, but it will have a little bit brighter sound than a ribbon microphone would. If you're doing a recording where you move around a lot, they do make condenser microphones that clip onto the flute. Those will definitely pick up more of the key sounds and everything, but if you're a very dynamic performer who moves around a lot and you can't be tied to a microphone, that's a great option. The Audix ADX10-FLP is a great clip on condenser microphone. The Neumann TLM 193 is a good option for a condenser microphone that you would put on a stand.

If you get a ribbon or a condenser microphone, you will also probably need to get an audio interface to be able to plug them into your computer. They're not just going to have a USB. It's going to be like a microphone end of the cord, so make sure you also factor that into your budget when you're looking at microphones. Once you have a microphone that can talk to your computer easily, Audacity is a really great software to learn. It's a free audio editing software, and it's really simple to learn. There's tons of tutorials online. EQ, or equalization, feels really daunting to learn. Some really simple steps can make a big difference in your flue sound.

You can add warmth and fullness to your sound if you feel like that didn't get picked up in the recording, with a little boost from around 500 hertz to 2K hertz. If it's excessively breathy, you can cut it a little bit in the five to six kilohertz range to get rid of that breathiness. Anytime you're editing sound, use headphones. Do not trust your computer speakers to give you an accurate idea of what is happening to the sound. I hope that was helpful. I know we're all doing so much more recording nowadays, that we can't play together. If you just put in a little bit of effort and a little bit of energy, you can sound a lot better on your recordings. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.

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