Alan Meyerson Talks Miking Strings

New York, NY (June 25, 2026)―Recording engineer and mixer Alan Meyerson, recently tasked with the live recording and subsequent mixing of Nico Cartosio’s latest album, turned to a new favorite mic for the orchestral sessions.

“I recently got quite into DPA microphones; once I started working with the DPA 4041, I realized there was something very special about them,” declares Meyerson, whose scoring credits spanning Dune, Jedi: Fallen Order, Gladiator and countless other landmark projects. “I wanted the DPAs to align with the Decca tree mics so there wasn’t any time delay if I wanted to use them both. That way, I had the ability to blend the two worlds without introducing phase issues.”

For the project, Meyerson relied heavily on DPA’s 4041 large diaphragm omnidirectional microphones, using them as the foundation of an immersive orchestral array layered directly above a traditional Decca tree setup. His system combined a classic LCR Decca tree with outriggers, while the DPA 4041s formed an immersive array designed for maximum phase coherence and imaging accuracy.

The immersive array consisted of left, center and right microphones, as well as two side channels, two surround channels and four height microphones, arranged in a square directly above their lower-layer counterparts. All microphones were omnidirectional, allowing the natural acoustic environment to be captured without coloration or directional artifacts.

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“They’re fully omni, stainless steel capsules, very fast and they have a tremendous amount of gain,” Meyerson notes. “What really struck me was the uniformity. DPA sent me five matched microphones and that consistency makes an enormous difference.”

By reducing reliance on excessive spot microphones, Meyerson found that the orchestra sounded more musically integrated. “When I started taking out a lot of the other mics and replacing them with this array, everything became more cohesive,” he explains. “You still had a picture-perfect image of the room. That’s incredibly hard to get.”

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The string sections took on what Meyerson describes as a “pillowy, beautiful warmth, while brass remained sharp and detailed, even during powerful passages played at full intensity. There was something about it that just blew everyone away. The imaging was incredible—not just phase coherent, but musically coherent.”