My first violin - How'd I do? *REMIX*

I've just listened to the last two samples from your most recent set (only).  All is so much a matter of personal preference, but I like this combination of a fairly close well-focussed sound set in a more distant halo of reverb.

In the solo Bach, there was one point where the violin hits a resonance in the instrument, the building, or the reverb, and the reverb 'booms' for a moment after the violin has moved on through the phrase - perhaps that could be 'ducked' with a wet/dry envelope at any such points?  

With the violin and piano personally I would have liked more spatial separation - my own taste is to have the piano extending somewhat to the right (as it does naturally if the violinist is standing in line with the keyboard, though of course there are other placements they use).  I like to hear some contrast between the more-or-less point source of the violin and the up to seven feet long piano.  (I note that is in direct opposition to a comment from another member above!)  For me, that can help with any balance problems because one is then able to add positional cues to the loudness cues in hearing which is doing what.  Again personally I'd use an MS pair to capture a natural balance, if this proved possible with the players and the acoustic - almost always I find there is a spot where the relative balance (loudness) between the two players is correct and the soundstage from left to right sounds natural - that's just my way of doing things -  the trouble is of course that varying the balance then means heaving the mic stand about from place to place rather than just inconspicuously varying the balance from discrete mics at the mixer discreetly away from the musicians.

Don't get me wrong - these are  fine recordings which do justice to the two fine young players, IMHO.  I hope they appreciated your work.

I noticed that the last example, the solo, had a wonderful halo about it, with the feeling that the performer was maybe 15 - 20 feet from me.  That was a very pleasing listening experience.  Contrast that to the first two, where it, especially the violin, was more of an in-my-face feel... I kept having the feeling of wanting to move back to get the sound of the entire room, to hear a more luscious halo of reverb that gives you the sense of a concert hall.  

I know you're in that position of having to please the artists, but I'd lobby strongly, perhaps showing them some of the comments here, to move more toward the direction of the original mixes.  In the end you'll give them what makes them satisfied, but, after that, if it were me who was you(??), my archival copy, for *my* own listening pleasure and for my resume portfolio, would sound closer to the examples you posted to start this topic... perhaps using the most recent post of the solo violin as the model to follow.  

There are all kinds of levels of musicianship, and when you come across an accomplished pair like these brothers, and it was *you* who got to record them, it is quite a pleasure, and an opportunity to place a gem in the engineering porfolio.

Now is when you could use those top of the line Senns, Beyers, etc. headphones to listen with critically.  I have mine on, and I want to thank you for sharing such a good recording.  I suppose a lot of my feeling is based on the fact that, while most of us are not professional engineers, through a lot of practice and struggle to understand audio processing, we can come up with some quite decent results.

Whilst waiting for tea to cook, I compared all of the samples to see what differences you'd made, and what (if anything) I'd change. And of course I'm listening in a different environment (even though I know quite a bit about yours!), so it's bound not to have quite the same tonal balance when I play them here.

But I think, on balance, that considering that this is a live performance, which is invariably a compromise, that I slightly prefer the remixed version. Peter's comment about the resonance is interesting - and he's right, although I'd say that it sounds like the violin rather than the room. And when you consider the overall impact of the sound (I'm talking mainly about the solo stuff here), I began to wonder... and so I removed 2.5dB at 3.8kHz with the parametric EQ, with a Q value of 0.3, and I think that if you did this first, and then applied the same amount of reverb, this resonance wouldn't be as noticeable. But we are talking very fine tuning here...

But hey, I can't play with the reverb, so I've just EQ'd it. And on this system, I prefer the sound with just that little bit less mid-range energy. Yes, we are talking about a very small change - but for me it means that listening for a longer period is slightly easier. I tried it on the longer sample as well, and came to the same conclusion.

But this is still excellent, especially for a first attempt.

I suppose a lot of my feeling is based on the fact that, while most of us are not professional engineers, through a lot of practice and struggle to understand audio processing, we can come up with some quite decent results.

Nowadays, there's less excuse than there has ever been - a lot of this has been demystified, and there is very little reason why, as Cal says, anybody with a little bit of nous shouldn't be able to make perfectly competent recordings - and hasn't Karl proved it!

Would you guys please stop posting samples? I feel so damn inept. Got to spend less time on this forum and more practising.

(learned another english word today...)