here's a great excert from electronic musician magazine, quoting Cake's Trumpet Player Vince DiFouri:
Let's talk about recording trumpet.
di Fiore: One of the reasons it's fun playing trumpet in this band is that I'm not part of a section. It's a guitar band and I'm the thing that sounds different. The trumpet is a good foil for the electric guitar. It gives it something different to react against.
We recorded trumpet mainly in a small bedroom where we'd put some carpet on the floor. There was a little bit of room sound, but not too much. The reverb wasn't washy, and for the most part, I played right up on the mic. We used an SM57 quite a bit. I tried other, more lush mics, like the Røde NTK. The Røde sounded really present, and we used it on about half the songs, but we got a tight sound on the SM57 that worked for a lot of the songs.
Once you're sure you're using the right mic, it makes it easier to record. You don't feel as ambivalent about things, because once you understand the mic, it's all up to you as the player. You know what you're going to get out of it, and the rest of it — the tone, etcetera — is up to you.
It's important to spend a lot of time with a mic, to listen to it in different rooms and see how it's responding. That gives you a sense of consistency. That's why I went with the SM57. I understood it. With some of the other mics there seemed to be too many factors that went into getting the most out of them. A lot of times I had to play something really in the moment, without time for an elaborate setup. I didn't have to have to treat the mic gingerly. I could just slap up the 57 and go.
That's true with the board setting too. You want to know what's coming from the mic, and what's coming from the board. I have to admit that I didn't want to even begin learning about the mics. I thought they weren't as important as the performance. But that's not really true. There are a lot of subtle and not so subtle characteristics about mics. In this case, it was usually best for me to stick with the simple thing and concentrate on the performance.
Here's a link to the whole interview, lots of great advice for home recording!
http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_home...ke/index2.html