Performing together with Real, Acoustic Instruments?

I am preparing some music with a flutist. As we practice in our living room, the sound is somewhat disappointing.

Drew Worthen has remarked somewhere, regarding his big Hauptwerk church installation, that real instruments do not blend well with wet sampled organs. He recommends using dry samples when playing with real instruments.

Unfortunately, for the specific music I am playing, the Hauptwerk sample needs to be rather wet. We will be performing in relatively small rooms that won't have a lot of reverb themselves, so the organ sample cannot be dry.

What can we do in this scenario to make it sound good and cohesive? One solution I have considered is having her play with a microphone and then creating artificial reverb which will be played through the Hauptwerk speakers. In my mind, this should help to blend the two instruments together. I haven't tried this yet.

Any other pieces of advice on how to make the sound blend, between a flute and a wet Hauptwerk sample? Also, if any of you have recordings of performance with Hauptwerk + real instruments, feel free to share - would love to see what's possible and how that sounds.

When I did this sometime ago, we used a "chamber organ" sample set with a viola. The room was fairly dry and the sample set had only a little reverberation added. The instrumentalist was very close to the speakers we used, The music was suitable for a single manual, no pedal instrument. It seemed to work well .

Iain

I wouldn't use a completely dry set, as these sound completely dead without added reverb and are designed to be used in a generous acoustic, but it should be fairly dry - after all, the flautist will only have the acoustic of the room to support them, and if the HW organ has a completely different acoustic the result will be very unnatural. I have found smallish modern or neoclassical samplesets to blend best with other instruments, at least in my music room.

I do this sort of thing quite often - since I also play many other instruments. I recommend using dry samples, as already suggested. The room will, therefore, provide the same acoustics for the "real" instrument and Hauptwerk, which would be what would happen in a real concert situation.

If the result is too dry, add convolutional reverb to the final recording (all instruments) later. The important point is to apply the same acoustics to all the instruments in the recording.

If you would rather go for the effect of a recording that close-mics the solo instrument and has the organ in the distance (as might be the case in a church), I still suggest adding the reverb after making the recording so that you can control this better and do a lot of experimenting in a short time.

Les

I've only tried HW and voice, but I thought the reverb in wet samplesets sounded silly in that setting. It seems like a flute would need a delicately voiced, for a small acoustic, semidry or dry sampled chamber organ. Not sure the musical style or national origin of the organ matters as much as working well with the solo instrument. Maybe a Silver Octopus chamber organ, for example, or PG's Melcer?