[Audio_Empire[_2_]]

On Friday, February 8, 2013 7:37:03 AM UTC-8, Gary Eickmeier wrote:
Audio_Empire wrote:



No, the type of recording that you are trying to legitimize here is

the equivalent of a

news program whereby the technicians think that the President's news

conference

would look better photographed in the Rose Garden, than in the White

House press

auditorium, so they superimpose the President over a background of

that outside area.

They are not there to create anything, but are there merely to

document the event. I

feel strongly that this is also the job of the recording

engineer/producer (talking

about classical music here as well as location-recorded jazz. Don't

really care what

the engineers/producers do with regard to pop. I suspect that the

job there is to make

the recording artists "happy" with the resultant sound no matter how

unlike reality that

sound might ultimately be.).



OK, we understand each other perfectly, but I just want to add that close or

multi miking can be a legitimate technique in certain circumstances. Think

about the live vs recorded demos of those early years. They would record a

string quartet anechoically, then play it back in the same room as the live

performers so that they would share the same acoustics and therefore both

sound live. So this is an example of a legitimate "they are here" stereo

recording technique, one that does not attempt to record another acoustic

space. Think about any jazz or pop recording with a singer in it. Would you

attempt to record the singer with anything but a single microphone, mixed in

with the overall perspective of the band, no matter how it was recorded?

Would you ever record them with just your purist techniques and without the

accent mike? Of course not. There just aren't enough channels to duplicate

reality all that well.

Wellm accent mikes are something else again and in my opinion constitute a
legitimate use of pan-potting as long as there is an overall stereo pair to get
the space "right". Panning an accent mike to the right space on on an instrument
that needs a bit of reinforcement is just good practice, and of course, a vocalist
needs a vocal mike to place him/her firmly in the phantom center channel on
playback.



It's kind of like a photograph or a painting. These are a new work of art,

based on some aspect of reality that the artist is trying to interpret

through the medium of composition, color, and light. It will be an image of

some reality, which might be an attempt at realism, a total decorative

creation, or something in between. But it will (usually) not be three

dimensional, so the artist uses perspective carefully to interpret

dimension.



I could go on with the analogy but the point is that certain techniques need

to be employed to bring out what the artist wants us to get out of the new

work. The painter may place the most important object or person in the

foreground, or compose it so that your eye is led to it, and so on. The

producer will make the singer perfectly clear and in the center foreground,

no matter where he or she may have been in reality. The guitar, perfectly

clear if you were there, may need to be accented in a recording to make it

clearer in the new medium.

Like I said, anything goes on pop music (and to be perfectly fair, many pop
"artists" using the recording medium and all of the tools available to the
modern recording studio to create the performance in the first place, and
without those tools, the performance simply does not and can not exist).

Your point, also well taken, is that if the producer knows nothing about

sound, he may think this multi-miking travesty is "even better" than a more

purist attempt to capture also the wonderful acoustics of the concert hall

they were in. He thinks he is shoving up-close super realism in our faces,

and that will be appreciated by his similarly uneducated audience and sell

records. Might as well also introduce smell-O-Vision so we can expereince

their body odor up close.



So definitions are definitions but recording is still an art, to be

practiced only by those who understand the medium. Would that be a fair

summary?

Exactly.