How To Record Music Outdoors

When the hills are alive with the sound of music, it’s up to us to record it.

You could argue that the great outdoors is the perfect recording environment. With no walls or ceiling to bounce things around, microphones pick up only the direct sound from the source. So, while there’s no good room sound to make your drums more impressive, there’s no bad room sound to corrupt the pure tones that the players are producing. Problems with spill where multiple musicians are being miked up are also much reduced.

However, there are very good reasons not to record outdoors. Wind and rain can make playing uncomfortable and miking impossible. Temperature changes play havoc with tuning. Ambient noise is inevitable, and nature does not provide mains power or heating. So, given the option, I’d hesitate to suggest working al fresco as a first choice to any artist. But when it was the artist’s own choice, I was happy to give it a go.

With no walls or ceiling to bounce things around, microphones pick up only the direct sound from the source. So, there’s no bad room sound to corrupt the pure tones that the players are producing.

Running Up That Hill

Singer‑songwriter Tymisha’s reasons for recording outdoors were less to do with acoustic purism and more about capturing video content for Instagram and Facebook. This meant that not only would we be tracking en plein air, but that we would be doing so on top of a remote hill in search of striking scenery. Reluctantly abandoning the idea of using valve mics and a console, I raided the studio to see what sort of backpackable laptop‑based rig I could assemble.

Although there are bus‑powered audio interfaces with more than two inputs, my MacBook Air is happier with smaller models, and battery life was going to be at a premium. My SSL 2+ audio interface has two mic/line/instrument inputs, and we would only be recording two sources: Tymisha’s voice and her acoustic guitar. This gave me several options. I could close‑mic the voice and guitar separately, as you might do on a typical studio recording. I could set up a stereo array to capture the complete picture. Or I could put up a single mic focused mainly on Tymisha’s voice, and record the pickup in her guitar to fill it out as necessary. I ruled out the first option in advance as being visually intrusive, and as it turned out, Tymisha planned to perform sitting on the ground, which would have made it amost impossible to get meaningful separation by close miking anyway.

On the day, I brought with me pairs of Sennheiser MKH 40 cardioid and MBHO 603/KA100 omni mics, plus two lightweight stands, a stereo bar, a DI box and an ancient Rycote blimp. Even in relatively still, dry weather, it was immediately obvious that simple foam windshields weren’t up to the task. The Rycote blimp was going to be the only practical choice for recording with microphones, and as I don’t own a suitable figure‑8 mic or M‑S mount, it would have to be mono. The most logical approach was to put one of the MKH 40s in the blimp and position it low down in front of Tymisha’s guitar, pointing up at her mouth.

..it was immediately obvious that simple foam windshields weren’t up to the task. The Rycote blimp was going to be the only practical choice for recording with microphones...

Making The Best Of It

All recording projects involve decision‑making, but those decisions tend to be more final when you’re out of the studio, and the success of a normal location recording project often hinges on there being a separate room where the production team can monitor on loudspeakers. Even if the only usable space is a dank cellar, this makes all the difference when it comes to evaluating sounds and performances. However, it’s obviously not an option at the top of a hill. And when you’re forced to monitor on headphones, I think it’s important to accept their limitations. Endless fine‑tuning of mic placement is as likely to be wrong as right in the cold light of day. You deviate from widely accepted stereo arrays at your peril. But you can, at least, get rough levels, and fair warning of problems such as clipping or incoming aircraft.

With no mains power and not even a makeshift control room available, monitoring on headphones was inevitable.Photo: James Petty

A good way to think about it is to ask yourself what problems would prevent you from delivering anything at all at the mix, and treat those as the highest priorities. In this case, I felt that the potential showstoppers would be excessive wind noise, and a failure to properly capture Tymisha’s vocals. And whilst I wouldn’t have trusted headphone monitoring to tell me whether ORTF was a more suitable array than A‑B or X‑Y, it was enough to help navigate these issues.

Wind noise was kept to a minimum by enabling the high‑pass filter on the MKH 40 and ensuring that the Rycote was as sheltered as possible. And in terms of mic placement, I concentrated on the relatively humble goal of ensuring that the balance between guitar and vocal always delivered enough of the latter. Like all good small‑diaphragm mics, the MKH 40 has a benign off‑axis response, so I wasn’t worried that the guitar tone would suffer unduly by being captured at 90 degrees. Meanwhile, the inevitable woolliness and high‑frequency attenuation introduced by the blimp was apparent even on headphones, but was clearly a price worth paying for greatly reduced wind noise.

With four songs captured overlooking England’s Best View (yes, really), it was decided that a change of scenery would add visual variety, so we packed up all the kit and trekked to the lake at the bottom of the hill. Here we tracked another five numbers with Tymisha and the mic poised precariously over open water. (Sennheiser’s RF mics have a well‑deserved reputation for coping with humid environments, but there are limits.) Oddly, the wind was more problematic here than on the crest of the hill, but otherwise the process was much the same.

Another angle on the chosen mic placement, which kept the blimp from obscuring Tymisha’s face whilst capturing plenty of vocal.Photo: James Petty

One of the more surprising challenges about recording outdoors is to make the result sound like it was recorded outdoors. The absence of room sound isn’t heard as an instinctual auditory cue telling your brain “This was recorded in a forest!” It just comes across as, well, dry. And with a singer as powerful as Tymisha, it’d take a particularly perky songbird to make itself audible on close mics during a take. Not having spare inputs available for distant mics, therefore, I retreated to a sheltered part of the wood, set up my omnis as a spaced pair and recorded a few minutes of birdsong to be laid over the top as required.

One of the more surprising challenges about recording outdoors is to make the result sound like it was recorded outdoors.

Choose Wisely

Back at home, listening on loudspeakers confirmed that both wind noise and minimum vocal level were under control. In fact, in the sections where Tymisha sang and played quietly, it sounded pretty good with minimal processing. However, when she switched to head voice and gave it both barrels, the volume difference was uncomfortable. As a result, I was left with three main challenges at the mix. One was to manage the vocal dynamics without undermining the consistency of the guitar sound. The second was to recover a natural tonality from a mic placed inside a blimp, and an under‑saddle pickup. And the third was to make the overall sound fit in with what viewers would eventually see on their phone screens.

With regard to the first of these, compressing the miked track as a whole would have meant imposing the same dynamic changes on the guitar as on the vocal. In other words, if a peak triggered 10dB of gain reduction on the mic track, that would be heard both as a levelling of the vocal and as an unnatural fluctuation in the level of the guitar. One way of tackling this would have been to send the vocal signal as a side‑chain input to a plug‑in on the guitar DI track. With modern plug‑ins, it’s not too difficult to arrange things such that gain reduction on one track is mirrored as expansion on another, which would have allowed the level of the DI track to be ridden automatically to compensate for level changes on the mic track. But I was relectant to start down this road, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, no amount of EQ was going to make the pickup signal sound exactly like the miked guitar. So even if this approach eliminated unwanted changes in the guitar level, it would still introduce unwanted changes in the guitar tone. And second, whilst it would have worked OK with a simple compressor, I knew that I was likely to want to use more complex, frequency‑dependent dynamics processes to control both the level and the timbre of the voice. Consequently, I parked this idea while I tested a simpler one: using source separation software to derive independent guitar and vocal tracks from the mic recordings.

FabFilter’s Pro‑MB was used to control the tonality of the vocal part that Hit‘n’Mix’s RipX separated out. The bands were configured so that upper‑mid and HF boosts became cuts in the louder vocal passages, as here.

The extent to which this is possible with Hit’n’Mix’s RipX never ceases to amaze me, and once I’d figured out that it didn’t like the clipped audio where Tymisha had clapped her hands for video sync, it delivered the goods once again. Artefacts were audible in the guitar split, but the vocal was astonishingly clean, and when the two were recombined at any sensible level, the blend sounded tolerably natural to my ears. I was able not only to impose some pretty strict compression on the vocal split, but also to use tools like FabFilter’s Pro‑MB and Oeksound’s Soothe 2 to boost the upper midrange in quiet passages whilst taming it in the loudest and most strident sections. Having a separate guitar split also allowed me to sneak some subtle stereo width into the picture by panning that and the DI track slightly left and right.

Relying On Oeksound Bloom

I knew that I would need to adjust the timbre of all the tracks to compensate for mic placement, HF loss from the blimp, and the inherently unnatual sound of an under‑saddle pickup. As always, your ears are the most important tools here, but I’ve also come to rely heavily on Oeksound’s Bloom plug‑in, both as a tonal shaper and a guide. My approach here is as follows. Bloom continally adjusts the timbre of the source to nudge it towards an internal target spectrum. Drop it on the master bus and you’ll often hear a noticeable change in the tonality of the mix. Assuming that feels like an improvement, I bypass Bloom and try to adjust EQ or multiband settings to achieve a similar frequency balance at source. I’ll then re‑enable Bloom and listen again. Hopefully, with each iteration, the difference that Bloom makes should get progressively smaller, and eventually you either reach a point where it’s not needed any more, or where you can’t match what it’s doing in other ways.

Oeksound’s Bloom plug‑in can be an invaluable guide to EQ setting as well as being a useful tool in its own right.

In this case, Bloom’s continuous dynamic frequency shaping made quite a difference over and above the best EQ settings I could muster, so I left it active in the final mixes. However, its default target response often sounds just a bit too ‘scooped’ to my ears. You can reshape the target using the faders, but I generally prefer to use its ‘window blinds’ to limit processing only to the midrange, especially in a situation like this where there is no real low end in the source signal. With Tymisha’s recordings, the satisfying overall frequency balance I ended up with was also undermined by exaggerated sibilance, and I had to add de‑essing both on the vocal track and the mix bus to keep things under control.

The final challenge was to make it sound believable as an outdoor location recording. As well as looping my birdsong track at a low level throughout, this also meant confronting the question of reverb. Under normal circumstances, Tymisha’s dramatic singing would benefit from equally theatrical use of effects. Leaving it completely dry robbed it of power, but any obvious delays or plate reverbs felt jarring in the visual context. I settled for a low‑key but pleasant hall reverb from the iamreverb convolution plug‑in, fed only from the vocal split and kept at the level where it reinforced the vocal without being clearly audible in its own right.

The iamReverb plug‑in provided an appropriately natural hall reverb that reinforced Tymisha’s voice without placing it in an acoustic that would have jarred with the visuals.

Flawless Takes

It always leads to mixed feelings when a recording made under compromised circumstances turns out better than carefully crafted studio productions, but the end result here really did surprise me. If anything, it sounds almost too polished, and I could imagine some viewers assuming that the video takes were mimed to studio recordings. But a lot of the credit for that must go to Tymisha, who delivered flawless takes of every song with no need for editing. And from my point of view, the experience reinforced a belief I’ve held for a long time. Acquiring more or better tools doesn’t make us better engineers. What makes the difference is really understanding the capabilities of the tools you already have — and that is equally true of cutting‑edge post‑processing software as it is of microphones.