Need Advice On Children's Choir Recording Options

[kwilinski]

I am making a CD for my son's choir to use as a fundraiser. We have received the mechanical rights for a dozen songs and I have recorded them live in a church. Now I am mixing and mastering.

I recorded using 4 large diaphram condenser mics through MOTU 896HD at 24 bit/96K. The mics were placed to have somewhat "separate" control over the different sections.

Since I am a newbie, I am interested in advice on various EQ, Compressor, Limiter, Reverb, etc... settings I might want to apply. I am using a G4 Dual 1.25 Power Mac with DP 5 and the stock plugins.

Any comments, ideas, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. A stereo mixdown of the four tracks (each at equal volume) for one of the songs is at the following link:

http://idisk.mac.com/kwilinski-Public

I have not changed the raw recording tracks other than to convert to an MP3 file at 160 kpbs using LAME encoder.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[gingau]

The mp3's sound pretty decent as they are (not easy to tell with that format through my powerbook speakers), the only thing that comes to mind is a little less piano in the mix, but that is just a personal preference.
With EQ; if nothing sounds out of place, then I usually leave it alone., You may want to do a search on the frequency range of children's voices to use as a reference. A general rule of thumb here is to cut slightly rather than boost.
There is probably not a whole lot of compression that needs to be done either, given the style of music, Use it if you want to tighten the dynamics so the low volume parts are closer to the highest volume.
With limiting, I usually look at where the highest volumes are and make that consistent with each song. You have to keep in mind dynamics again - within the song and from song to song.
Your reverb is probably built in with the church acoustics - I wouldn't add a thing.

so, from my point of view, you have little editing to do. Make sure your levels are close to normalized, and play with the stereo spread. I like 2, 4, 8, and 10 o'clock as a good starting point.

[kevinr]

I enjoyed your recording, but IMHO you shouldn't get too hung up over effects etc. The ORIGINAL is what counts and I'm curious about the FOUR mics. The end result is rather diffuse - attractive, but diffuse. Did you consider going with a simple crossed pair on the choir? It might have produced clearer stereo imaging. Sorry if that sounds like I'm being a pain after all your hard work.

[kwilinski]

I cut down to two mics, added EQ, and a little compression to piano. Attempted to pan the sound out to make wider. The following link has the orginal tracks file and my current mix. If you have time, please listen and comment. I plan to use my final recipe for the other seven songs we recorded.

Thanks again for the input.

http://idisk.mac.com/kwilinski-Public

Best regards,

MOTUski