[Arny Krueger]

"Laurence Payne" lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in
message
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 04:22:08 +0200, Boris Lau
wrote:

I have been fooled, and I've fooled others. The basic
trick i've used is to make a good close-miced recording
of a small group performing in a room, and then play
the recording back in the same room from pretty good
speakers in the same general vicinity as the origional
performance.

Well, yeah. But I'm still suspicious about that "close
inspection part" ;-)

If you "closely inspect" a live performance, you'll find
all kinds of fault with it. Hopefully, the music and the
performance take over your attention so that all but
gross technical imperfections are masked.

Good point. Beginning recordists run afoul of this all the time. They make a
recording that is often pretty fair, but wonder why the live performance
sounded so good, and the recording sounds so bad.

This also applies to the performance itself. People who listen for pleasure
often miss a lot of mistakes during the live performance. I don't have a
problem with this. I sort of miss the days when I could listen to music
without my "critical listening module" becoming engaged.

Real world example from the past week. I was sitting in the sound booth with
a semi-pro vocalist at my elbow during a performance. After the show she was
oohing and ahhing over another vocalist's performance. I said something
like, well it was OK, but she made the following fairly serious mistakes -
bing, bing, bing, and bing. When I say serious, the one I remember most
clearly is that she started singing a verse during a bridge, about 4
measures early. She recovered pretty well, but... Furthermore, I've
recorded her performing that song at least 4 times, and her voice is getting
so harsh that I have been premptively low pass filtering it at progressively
lower frequencies for everybody's benefit. It just came out.

Part of being an experienced live performance recordist is hearing as many
fixable problems as possible during the setup and (hopefully) the rehearsal
(s), and then fixing as many of them as possible before the final take.
Hopefully you have a director or producer on hand to work the musical issues
out with the talent.