Wow, your playing is so perfect and your tone is so mellow. Those high notes sound effortless. All your mic locations give good results. I have been experimenting with mic location because my tone is bad, sometimes shockingly bad.
We changed our house from all carpet to all hard flooring. Now the sound is terrible. I can hardly understand the children talking. Now I feel like a homeless person living in a parking garage. The echo is ridiculous. We have no rugs and no soft furniture beyond a sofa. One room is huge. I practice in an ordinary sized room. The echo is so bad, I wear these
earmuffs when practicing.
For the small room, I get best results with the bell pointed towards the mic, and be maybe 3 feet or closer. For the big room, the echo is a little more acceptable because of the open feel. But it's still excessive to me, so I think pointing the bell towards the mic is best.
But my needs are different than yours. There are a couple of problems with my playing that can be somewhat minimized with mic placement. One is the attacks on the notes are not clean. There is a momentary hiss of air. The other problem is tone on high notes. I have been trying to improve tone for months. I believe my high note tone problem is due to pulling my lips back against my teeth to get the note to play. I am trying to learn to play those notes without relying on the teeth so much. I also need to separate my teeth more, but I think lip strength needs to improve for that. I bet you can benchpress 350 with your lips.
I am using a fairly
cheap mic, but it's very accurate. I can actually pick up a signal from a 90 KHz tone. I don't think I can make any significant improvement by switching mics.
My Yamaha YBB-104 is smaller than your Bb, but I am certain it would sound amazing if someone like you played it. It has no major unrepaired dents. Today I pressured tested it using a low pressure regulator and flowmeter. Sealing off the bell was a pain. But the leakage rate is as low and an exceptionally good trumpet, even though the valves are bigger. Soapy water confirmed no leakage anywhere beyond the tiny valve seepage.
So that leaves my lips. I think they need time to gain strength and flexibility. Anyway, I made some recordings with different mic placements. Pretty amazing the different range of resulting sounds.
For low notes, I played a few bars from
Hogan's Heroes March. Here are the variations:
1) Mic dropped all the way down into the bell crook. Volume reduced because of excessive bass.
2) Mic in bell, 4 inches below rim.
3) Mic level with bell.
4) Mic above bell (4 inches).
5) Mic above bell (8 inches).
6) Mic above bell (36 inches).
7) Chunk of carpet over bell, mic 4 inches away.
8) Mic on floor (still in small room).
9) Big room, mike far away.
For high(er) notes, I played a few bars from
Mexican Hat Dance. Here are the variations:
1) Mic dropped all the way down into the bell crook (kind of loud).
2) Mic halfway down bell.
3) Mic in bell, 4 inches below rim.
4) Mic level with bell.
5) Mic above bell (4 inches).
6) Mic above bell (8 inches).
7) Mic above bell (36 inches).
8) Mic on floor (still in small room).
9) Big room, mike far away.
10) Big room, bell pointed toward mic (horn sideways and hard to play).
11) Same as 9 above, but filtered with 'sox lowpass -1 1000'.
Some of those samples sound like I am just buzzing the mouthpiece. But I swear the tuba was attached for all of them.
Filtering seems like a way to hide problems, so I'm not too excited to improve my tone by that method. But lowpass filtering does help remove the hiss from airy attacks, and also removes high overtones that give the buzzing sound to high notes.
