3. Recording

Volume I

14 Jul

These recordings are enthusiastically, gloriously anachronistic. It’s also a been fascinating, rewarding and exponentially-expanding process of discovery.

As I said in the introduction, this was (and is) an experimental project. Of course, it’s meant to be a nice way in to some cracking music. But for me, it’s also a chance to try things out, get better at my instrument, and get comfortable with recording equipment and software. In this article, I wanted to have a brief look at the process of making the recordings you hear on the first album, both creatively and technically.

There are a few different layers to this kind of recording process. At the base level, there are some fairly dull technical questions, like what microphones you’re using, where they’re placed relative to the instrument, even what sort of room you’re recording in. I know a lot of home studio enthusiasts really go in for serious modifications (e.g. soundproofing) - that wasn’t really practical for me, but it hasn’t really bothered me too much so far. Perhaps because it’s not so obvious when layering instruments that are as resonant as the gamba? With a lot of this stuff, I suspect it might be a case of diminishing returns. Certainly you’ll see messageboards on the internet that go into astonishing detail, and sometimes equally astonishing expense. It seems like a universal law: as you become more sensitive, the tiniest things start to bother you; in turn, the resources you need in order to fix them become greater and greater, even as the problems themselves become smaller and smaller! That’s why we have professional record companies, whose aim is often ‘the perfect recorded sound’.

While those high technical standards are worthy of admiration, plenty of people have raised philosophical and aesthetic objections, often on the basis that musical experience doesn’t always correlate well with the search for ever more finessed, well-executed ‘products’. So while this first album is far from perfect, I don’t think it’s flippant to argue that there actually needs to be a place for a looser, less precious, dare I say ‘more human’ (??) music-making, which is not necessarily so technically polished.

As recording technology becomes ever more affordable, it does open up more possibilities for musicians themselves to explore and share that side of their art. As I’ve said elsewhere, this process has allowed me to be up front about the fact that any recording is just one snapshot of a musician’s thinking and playing. It’s all a process, and to treat any such moment as a ‘final product’ - or your ‘final word’ on a piece - is, in a way, to turn that glorious flux into something artificially, needlessly static.

Anyway, manifesto over. As it turns out, even the ‘boring stuff’ is quite interesting for a musician to discover! For instance, microphone placement is vastly more important than you would ever realise if you’ve never listened back to the differences. Just a few centimeters can have an enormous effect - especially on the tone of the instrument, and also of the sound of the room you’re playing in. It’s quite hard to grasp the impact that has in any other way than to dive in and get your hands dirty, trying things out and listening back. Although many recording engineers have an excellent theoretical understanding, there’s definitely no substitute for experience mixed with intuition. Top recording engineers really are wizards, and it’s good to be reminded of how much impact these variables have on the sound of music!

Interestingly, I experimented once or twice with using extra microphones, because I thought it was just possible that having the option of a more distant sound as well might help at the mixing stage. Perhaps those could be used as another kind of input for ‘longer’ reverbs? That turned out to be much less effective than I thought it might be, although maybe I’ll find a way to make it work in future. But on this first album, everything you hear is just from a single microphone, in the middle of my small office! It turns out that’s bascially all you need, as well as an interface and a DAW, which is pretty amazing and liberating. I wish I’d known that years ago.

Obviously you don’t want to be messing about with mixing or reverbs while actually recording the tracks themselves. That’s the luxurious/frustrating bit of witchcraft that comes much later. The creative process I used, as I said in the intro, was targeted at finding maximum flexibility, so it tended to involve lots of back and forth between the 2/3 parts, alongside some editing, timing adjustments, and occasional ‘dropping in’ of phrases to make the best takes work nicely with each other. (That was probably the hardest bit).

I don’t mind admitting that there’s a bunch of edits. I’m not precious about that, especially as it was me who did them. Perhaps I would feel more guilty if I had a producer ‘fixing things’ for me? It’s hard to say. The point is that those sorts of techniques were aimed at making the recordings sound as natural as I heard them in my head. Not every moment works; on the other hand, as I’ve said elsewhere, consistency wasn’t my priority. I didn’t use a click at any stage, for instance, and I think that trade-off is worth it overall.

For the record, individual viol tracks are extremely well-suited to edits or ‘cross-fades’, where you blend two tracks into each other. That’s because the resonances, once your bow has left the string, are extremely ringy, stable and consistent. That makes the ends of notes the perfect place to hide an edit. I didn’t use more than I needed to - but it was great to be able to choose the playing I thought was most characterful, and try and make those work with each other. So it was used much more creatively than just as a way of ‘patching mistakes’. A lot of the success of that approach was dependent on how much momentum I had, musically; it wasn’t usually very successful to come back to something another time, so mostly the pieces were recorded in one or two sessions.

Mixing was the bit that took a long time for me to be remotely happy with - and I can recommend jumping into a project like this, because it provides a really organic learning curve. For me, as I’m sure for many people, it was a truly iterative process: you think you have something that works, then you realise what’s wrong with it, go back to the drawing board; rinse and repeat.

In terms of sound and reverb, what I’ve done here is obviously no substitute for a real performance in a real acoustic. And yet I was pretty amazed by how well moden artificial reverbs are able to approximate the pleasing resonances you have in your head - or indeed reference recordings - if you work out how to handle them. I ended up using an ‘algorithmic’ reverb: software that doesn’t take data from real venues, but which computes the properties of a space from the parameters you provide. This proved amazingly flexible, and although I’m not always convinced on certain kinds of devices, it’s pretty amazing to witness how far from my office the sound has come.

One thing I learnt a while back, which proved really useful, was to use reverbs in layers; each with slightly different parameters that model the placement of different microphones in a large space. As usual, there’s a huge amount of trial and error with this, and often you’re using the reverb controls in conjunction with equalisation (‘EQ’). EQ is often associated with produced/pop music than classical, but in this case it was (paradoxically!) necessary to make the sound more natural. I won’t go into detail on that here, but it’s worth mentioning that the uneven response of different notes on a string instrument is extremely noticeable when close miked, so it does need a surprising amount of intervention. The precise balance of frequencies at each stage of the mix involves so many possible variables, that it’s almost as complex as working out how to play the music in the first place!

Going back to reverbs, though. I remember working on the mix, and getting more and more frustrated that no matter what I did, there just wasn’t enough ‘space’ in the sound - it was all far too close. So I tried ripping up most of my (fairly conservative) starting assumptions, and went with much longer echo times, with quite a long ‘pre-delay’ (the time between the signal arriving and the reverb kicking in) - but turning them all down much lower than they had been previously. There were still lots and lots of tweaks to make after that, but I remember that experiment being a real breakthrough.

There is undoubtedly a whole universe out there to discover, when it comes to making convincing recordings from home. I’m certainly nowhere near an expert after one project, but I had a fun time! It’s definitely something any musician can do: all it needs is willingness to experiment, and trust in your own ears. Eventually you just have to sign something off, and let it go. As it is, I’m looking forward to making the next one, and discovering what I should have done in Volume 1!

Browse all articles

Chasing Tails - Home