"I Wish You Love"? (Looks like he's wearing the same hat and tie as the MIGHT AS WELL BE SWING session at the top of the post.)
Ha! Nice to hear from you, Greg! Yeah, I've love that shot of AM and her windscreen since I first saw it years ago. What the heck??? As far as the popping P's thing, I'm still not 100% sold on that mic in all those shots being a Sennheiser 405. I'll try to get some pics up. Matt
It seems odd, but is it just me???? (photo link and photo link) ....and I'm not sure it's the same mic in both Sinatra shots. The upper photo of Sinatra is the one I'm mainly looking at. Matt
This was a 96K transfer from the orig 3 trks. What we got was more popping P's. I tried to minimize them using the same ol bag of tricks, high pass, editing etc. The result is what you get. If you dig too deep you take away from the voice, not enough digging and you blow woofers (not really). It's the compromise you arrive at. ALL mixing is a compromise. Its all about the music.
Larry -- thank you for the comments, which are much appreciated. I think I speak for all the Sinatra fans here when I say that your posts are welcome and encouraged, to put it mildly. Great to hear directly from you on this stuff! Matt Lutthans
I'm pretty sure that the mic in the photo with Bing is a Schoeps, as the windscreen is a Schoeps. (Could also be a Sennheiser 405 if the diameter of the mic is equal to the Schoeps, which I believe is 21mm, which is fairly common.) Credit to member "Thwacker" at gearslutz.com for sending me this following info on the other mic in the photos that MMM uploaded. He thinks it's an AKG D24, which is a dynamic, not a condenser, and which uses a DIN/Tuchel connector, as I had suspected in an earlier post. Here's his photo of his D24:
Steve Hoffman wrote: Now, that quote makes a lot more sense to me in context of a D24 dynamic than an MKH 405. (Again, I own and use two MKH series condensers, and they have gorgeous sound quality, although mine are admittedly a newer model.) Matt
On the back of the new Frank / The Voice book by James Kaplan, there's another photo of a very mid sixties looking studio Sinatra with a U 47. Doesn't look the same as the '67 session with daughter already pictured in post 45.
Perhaps, but the D24 has those slots down one (?) side. Perhaps all of the photos are from the same angle or something, but the body appears to be solid in all of them, which would seem to rule out the D24.
Yes, I had thought of that, too, but note that in every photo, the clip used is not a typical on-the-mic-body mic clip, but rather the kind that attaches to the cable/connector, which would be desirable with a mic that has the cancellation grill/slots. I've used a similarly-designed Electro-Voice RE-15, and have always had to be very careful to not block the slots. Using the end-mount mic clip would avoid the problem altogether.
By the way, there is this "talk" of the MKH 405 being "more directional" than a U47. The 405 is a cardioid mic, and the U47 has two settings: cardioid and omnidirectional. There may be some subtle differences in pickup pattern, but the 405 is going to be essentially the same in terms of pickup pattern as a U47 in cardioid mode. The more popular MKH 406 was, IIRC, a "short shotgun" mic; the 405 was not. Matt
I've read somewhere that Frank's favorite mike was a dynamic, although I can't for the life of me locate the link/comment right now. I wonder why he would prefer a dynamic?
Probably he was referring to what he liked to use in a live concert setting. Possibly the dynamic was his choice owing to lesser proximity effect. He liked to move the microphone in differing places (pull it back, move it closer...) like it was an instrument. Perhaps the dynamic could accomplish this and retain the characteristics that he liked, or his sound man liked.
I'd be that it stemmed from the mind of Bill Putnam. He was a world-famous engineer, but he did some unusual stuff, to understate things. Matt
Proximity effect is relative to the pattern of the microphone, not the composition. A cardioid dynamic experiences the same proximity effect that a cardioid condenser (or ribbon) does. I'm still a bit suspicious of that mic being a D24, as we see it from multiple angles and the slots are not visible in any. Unless the camera always happened to be shooting from the opposite direction. If anyone is in touch with Chuck Granata, he might be able to indicate what his source was. I would guess Lee Herschberg, but that's just a guess.
If somebody has a higher resolution photo of any of those MPTV shots, that might help, too, as the D24 has that black rotating dial at the base of the windscreen. I tend to trust photographs better than 45-year-old memories, at least in some cases. Matt
That "other mic," the one in the shot with Bing Crosby from MPTV, for instance, is one for which we may never get an answer. It's a Schoeps basket-type windscreen (available in Schoeps/Posthorn catalogs since at least the early '60s, probably since the '50s, and still available with a slightly different cosmetic makeup today), but that windscreen will fit on any 21mm diameter mic, so unless some other characteristic of the mic can be clearly made out, it's going to be a tough call. What sort of characteristic? Take this Simon and Garfunkel video, for instance: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/592411-REG/Schoeps_W_20_W20_Basket_Windscreen_for.html In the opening shot, we see the Schoeps windscreen, but we can also see the Neumann logo "badge" just above the mic connector. (See logo below.)
I have no idea when or where this was taken, but here's our Frankie using what is definitely an AKG D24. Note the slots running across the body of the mic. Matt
I wonder where/when that was. Kind of amazing how nasty looking some of that equipment at United/Western was. Pop screens that didn't fit at all, masking tape on expensive microphones...
