Recording “Great Things You Have Done” (part four)

While Ohio was under a “Stay-At-Home” order due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided it would be a perfect time for us to record a song together as a family. Thankfully, our home is also the location of Taylor’s Playground Recording Studio.

We took a few pictures throughout the process and had everyone speak into the camera each day, simply talking about their experience. The end result is a song that we are pretty proud of and a fun family memory that we will not soon forget.

We hope that our little recording adventure, as well as the song that was created, will be a blessing to you. God truly has done great things and is worthy of our worship.

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DAY FOUR started out with a lesson about microphones. To the average person, every microphone is essentially exactly the same. Fair enough… but that’s not really accurate. There are SO MANY subtle differences from one microphone to the next.

For the purpose of recording the violin, we were using the Blue Kiwi large diaphragm condenser microphone. Personally, I LOVE the Blue Kiwi. It is a truly great microphone.

Not only is the Blue Kiwi a great vocal microphone (typically when set to the cardioid pattern), but it is also an amazing microphone for recording an acoustic instrument like the the violin. To really capture the full beauty and essence of the violin, I like to set the microphone in the omnidirectional pattern.

To keep this simple, a microphone set to a cardioid pattern essentially picks up the sound of whatever is directly in front of it. Because of that, it is also susceptible to what is called the “proximity effect”. This means that a sound source that is closer to the microphone will be thicker and deeper. A sound source that is further from the microphone, or off to the side, will sound much thinner. That can be a huge problem for the violin.

A microphone that is set to an omnidirectional pattern will not be affected by proximity. It will essentially pick up everything in the room in practically the exact same way. This is super helpful when recording an acoustic instrument, but it does require spectators to be a little more quiet.

The kids seemed to have a blast playing “the Quiet Game” while Taylor was recording her violin part. She is really becoming a great violinist, and it was SO MUCH FUN to have her play her instrument on this recording.