I am sometimes asked what's the most difficult instrument to record at Octave Records and I will have to say woodwinds.
If you have a chance to spend time with Octave Record's release of The Art of HiFi: Woodwinds, you'll hear the results of those recording challenges. In general, I am pleased with the recordings (and in a couple of tracks, pretty danged excited).
So, what's so tough about woodwinds? The sound comes out of multiple places: the reed and mouth juncture, the keys, and the horn. Where does one place the microphone?
If you position the microphone too far away from the musician in an effort to capture all of the sources of sound you lose any chance of intimacy with the instrument—and intimacy is sooooo important in a recording like the kind we make where it sounds like the player is in the room with you.
You can also try multiple microphones: one at the bell of the horn, one a little bit further away to capture the mouth and keys. I've had pretty good luck with this technique but one must be careful with phase response between the two microphones.
What's interesting to me is all the new challenges one encounters when focusing on various different instrument types—learning what works and what doesn't with the goal of capturing truly live sounding recordings.
That challenge is for me what keeps me coming back to the problem, time and again.
