Melville Guitars
Chris Melville is a master luthier who specializes in creating hand-crafted acoustic guitars which are highly sought after by professional players and serious amateur musicians alike.
While I host and maintain the Melville Guitars website, the site was actually designed and built by Andrew Scrivens and the featured photography was done by Kirsty McPhee.
When the site was first opened, I had the opportunity to record a few videos of Chris demonstrating some popular models of guitars in his range. The highlight of these videos is actually the quality of the audio rather than the look of the video. The purpose was to be able to accurately present the sound of the guitar without any audio enhancements of any kind. This series of videos was shot in the workshop at Melville Guitars.
The audio was captured using an M/S microphone array which can be seen in the lower portion of the video. The microphones were a Neumann KM184 cardioid condenser and a Cloud JRS-34 ribbon microphone.
The signals were fed into an Rupert NEVE Amek 9098 Dual Mic Preamp where they were decoded into the stereo pair that we hear on the video. No audio processing of any kind (noise reduction, equalisation, reverb, etc) was used on these recordings. They are the truest possible representation of exactly how the guitars really sound – clarity, resonance and sustain.
I recommend that you have a listen to this video (and the others in the series) through a good set of headphones.