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#1
Posted to rec.audio.pro
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WANTED: musically illiterate tape operator
I've been reading "Piano Notes" by Charles Rosen, and he has a chapter on the recording process from the point of view of the pianist. There are some good anecdotes. Excerpts: The larger record companies had a rigid hierarchy in allotting the tasks during a recording. There was the producer who sat in judgment, and marked the score indicating the mistakes. He registered the better executions, and kept the log of how many minutes and seconds each take had required, and where it began and ended. There was the sound engineer who placed the microphones and twiddled the dials in order to achieve the balance. Finally, there was the technician who handled the tapes, pushed the buttons to start and stop the machine, and eventually would do what editing was required at the command of the producer. By a curious union regulation of the 1960s in the United States, the tape man was forbidden to know how to read music: that would have given him an unfair advantage over his colleagues. Of course, many of the technicians knew perfectly well how to read music but they could not admit it. That meant that when you wanted the technician to cut the tape at a certain point, you were not allowed to show him the score so that he could see where to make the splice. The tape had to be played, and the technician had to be given a hand signal at the arrival of the note as if he were a musician in an orchestra given the cue for his solo. This was the system in place for all the years I recorded for the various CBS labels--Epic and Odyssey Records, CBS International, and Columbia Masterworks. When I began, the first records were all made in their official New York studio, which was a large and handsome defrocked church in the low Thirties on the East Side. The acoustics were splendid. However, at one point the wife of one of the directors of Columbia Records decided that it looked rundown and tacky, and ordered some decorative curtains installed on the walls in a few places. The sound immediately deteriorated, became drier, losing resonance and warmth. I blamed this on my playing: after hearing the first takes I said that I evidently could not play the work convincingly, and I canceled the session (on only one other occasion did I ever cancel a recording session). When I returned a month later, the curtains had been removed--or at least opened up to reveal the bare and acoutically gratifying plaster walls--and my playing had improved. On tailoring the sound to the music: There used to be a prejudice that music of different styles needed different sorts of resonance--not merely music of different genres (it is reasonable that a symphony should make us believe in a larger space than a string quartet or a song cycle), but that a contemporary piece should have a drier and more acid sound than the standard Romantic works. I experienced the results of this nonsense once with two days of recording for French radio. On the first day I played almost an hour of Schumann, and the quality of the recording seemed reasonable. On the second day, I played Schoenberg's opp. 19 and 25, and listening to the first take I was astonished at the ugly sound, although it was the same studio and the same instrument. "This is the microphone setup for contemporary music," the engineer assured me, but I insisted that the placement of the previous day be restored. I was reminded of Schoenberg's remark, "My music is not modern, just badly played." There was a policy of recording it badly as well: a magnificent performance of Schoenberg's piano music by Edward Steuermann was issued on a record some years ago that made it sound as if it had been played in a confined space like a small bathroom. Finding the balance between too much resonance and too little is not only difficult, but obstructed by the aesthetic taste of some sound engineers. The first record I made for CBS was Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, and the sound engineer started by placing one of the microphones so close as to be almost inside the piano. The opening piece, Ondine, begins with a soft irregular tremolo, representing the shimmering light on water. Placing a microphone very close to the instrument emphasizes the initial percussive impact of each note as it is struck and removes the liquid blending together of the total sonority that was Ravel's clear intention. With the microphone so close to the strings at the upper part of the piano, the sound was considerably more brittle than it was sitting at the keyboard. When I said I thought that the microphone was too close, the sound engineer protested that if it were moved farther away, we would lose fidelity. That was what we wanted, of course: less fidelity. Otherwise the opening page sounded like a finger exercise by Czerny. Ondine was meant to be heard in the large space of a concert hall, and demands a considerable amount of room sound. Reluctantly the sound engineer pretended to move the microphone away, and was at last persuaded to make the distance perceptible to eye and ear (an inch can make an extraordinary difference). |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.pro
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WANTED: musically illiterate tape operator
Tatonik wrote: "On tailoring the sound to the music: "
That engineer was probably operating under orders of a producer for the type of sound they were looking for: over-produced top-40 sound, a la Bieber or Taylor Swift. (facepalm!) |
#3
Posted to rec.audio.pro
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WANTED: musically illiterate tape operator
Fascinating read. Thanks.
On 07/24/2017 01:59 AM, Tatonik wrote: I've been reading "Piano Notes" by Charles Rosen, and he has a chapter on the recording process from the point of view of the pianist. There are some good anecdotes. Excerpts: The larger record companies had a rigid hierarchy in allotting the tasks during a recording. There was the producer who sat in judgment, and marked the score indicating the mistakes. He registered the better executions, and kept the log of how many minutes and seconds each take had required, and where it began and ended. There was the sound engineer who placed the microphones and twiddled the dials in order to achieve the balance. Finally, there was the technician who handled the tapes, pushed the buttons to start and stop the machine, and eventually would do what editing was required at the command of the producer. By a curious union regulation of the 1960s in the United States, the tape man was forbidden to know how to read music: that would have given him an unfair advantage over his colleagues. Of course, many of the technicians knew perfectly well how to read music but they could not admit it. That meant that when you wanted the technician to cut the tape at a certain point, you were not allowed to show him the score so that he could see where to make the splice. The tape had to be played, and the technician had to be given a hand signal at the arrival of the note as if he were a musician in an orchestra given the cue for his solo. This was the system in place for all the years I recorded for the various CBS labels--Epic and Odyssey Records, CBS International, and Columbia Masterworks. When I began, the first records were all made in their official New York studio, which was a large and handsome defrocked church in the low Thirties on the East Side. The acoustics were splendid. However, at one point the wife of one of the directors of Columbia Records decided that it looked rundown and tacky, and ordered some decorative curtains installed on the walls in a few places. The sound immediately deteriorated, became drier, losing resonance and warmth. I blamed this on my playing: after hearing the first takes I said that I evidently could not play the work convincingly, and I canceled the session (on only one other occasion did I ever cancel a recording session). When I returned a month later, the curtains had been removed--or at least opened up to reveal the bare and acoutically gratifying plaster walls--and my playing had improved. On tailoring the sound to the music: There used to be a prejudice that music of different styles needed different sorts of resonance--not merely music of different genres (it is reasonable that a symphony should make us believe in a larger space than a string quartet or a song cycle), but that a contemporary piece should have a drier and more acid sound than the standard Romantic works. I experienced the results of this nonsense once with two days of recording for French radio. On the first day I played almost an hour of Schumann, and the quality of the recording seemed reasonable. On the second day, I played Schoenberg's opp. 19 and 25, and listening to the first take I was astonished at the ugly sound, although it was the same studio and the same instrument. "This is the microphone setup for contemporary music," the engineer assured me, but I insisted that the placement of the previous day be restored. I was reminded of Schoenberg's remark, "My music is not modern, just badly played." There was a policy of recording it badly as well: a magnificent performance of Schoenberg's piano music by Edward Steuermann was issued on a record some years ago that made it sound as if it had been played in a confined space like a small bathroom. Finding the balance between too much resonance and too little is not only difficult, but obstructed by the aesthetic taste of some sound engineers. The first record I made for CBS was Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, and the sound engineer started by placing one of the microphones so close as to be almost inside the piano. The opening piece, Ondine, begins with a soft irregular tremolo, representing the shimmering light on water. Placing a microphone very close to the instrument emphasizes the initial percussive impact of each note as it is struck and removes the liquid blending together of the total sonority that was Ravel's clear intention. With the microphone so close to the strings at the upper part of the piano, the sound was considerably more brittle than it was sitting at the keyboard. When I said I thought that the microphone was too close, the sound engineer protested that if it were moved farther away, we would lose fidelity. That was what we wanted, of course: less fidelity. Otherwise the opening page sounded like a finger exercise by Czerny. Ondine was meant to be heard in the large space of a concert hall, and demands a considerable amount of room sound. Reluctantly the sound engineer pretended to move the microphone away, and was at last persuaded to make the distance perceptible to eye and ear (an inch can make an extraordinary difference). |
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