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Tatonik Tatonik is offline
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Default 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).

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[email protected] thekmanrocks@gmail.com is offline
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Posts: 1,742
Default 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!)
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Tobiah Tobiah is offline
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Posts: 666
Default 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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