The View from 2005: This article is even more true and useful today than it was when Alex and I wrote it. Nothing has changed, except that there are even more home studios and even fewer commercial studios. The relationship between performance intensity and the recording studio is every bit as true now as it was then. We haven’t gotten better at it at all. So here’s your chance. Go for it!

The recording studio is, along with its many virtues, an emotion filter. This is to say that the process of recording tends to filter out the emotional intensity of the musical experience. By the time a multitrack recording has gone through tracking, overdubs, mixing and mastering, the emotional intensity of the music is down to, say, 10% of what was it was during the performance. Classical stereo recording is just as bad, with performers’ obsessions for note-perfect execution leading to compulsive and anal-retentive editing, as in “Could you replace the second half of the G# eighth note in Bar 221 with the one from Take 412? I think I got that one right.”

As performers, we learn early on that we have to project intensity – what seems exaggerated on-stage sounds right to the audience. The same is even more true for recordings. To make effective and successful recorded music, the performers have to inject an immense amount of extra intensity into their recorded performances. Everything has to be pushed, exaggerated, and really fired up, just to come out sounding normal in the end-users living room!

Unfortunately, the recording studio is, in general, an especially difficult, unmusical place in which to bring this off, or in which to simply be creative. This is due to the nature of the beast.

The Recording Studio as Operating Room

For surgery, we go to a hospital. Why? Because it is designed to be the ideal place for the surgeon to perform her craft — high tech equipment, sanitary conditions, nifty green gowns, etc. It provides an environment which maximizes the safety and effectiveness of the surgical operation.

When we record music we are faced with a similar need for such an environment. We need a high quality audio environment in which the recording engineer can perform her craft, an environment designed to permit us to create a sonically excellent recording, including the equipment, acoustically sanitary conditions, etc.

At the same time, unfortunately, we also need a safe, comfortable setting in which to create music, or an intensely supportive one, such as a club with an enthusiastic audience, in which to perform. The recording studio is neither of these. It is difficult, for instance, to imagine how the Beatles managed to be so profoundly creative while they worked in a studio whose engineers wore white lab coats! Such environments led to creative independent studios like the Record Plant and Electric Ladyland, whose owners challenged the laboratory ambience of traditional recording studios owned by major labels of the day.

The current best example of this sort of design effort is probably Peter Gabriel’s beautiful Real World Studio in Bath, England with its much envied (particularly by this author, who has worked underground for the past six years!) sunlight and lake views for your next session. Unfortunately, it is beyond the resources of most of us. However, all is not hopeless. The potential for highly musical and more creative recording is becoming greater for all us regular folk due to two important trends.

New and Improved!

First, there is the constant improvement/cost reduction of audio technologies. Our ability, both physical and fiscal, to accurately capture, store, play back and process sounds continues to improve by leaps and bounds. In less than 50 years we have gone from one-take ‘live to acetate’ to an age of non-destructive digital multitrack editing. In 1960, a single professional audio tape track cost about half a Porsche. Today it costs approximately .01 Porsches. In approximately 1970, Simon and Garfunkel used an elevator shaft for the drum reverb on “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Today, you and I can use a half rack space digital reverb and dial up a stereo, flanged, gated reverb with variable room size! You get the point: the tools we use in our craft are certainly more flexible and probably more powerful today than yesterday, and they are definitely designed to enhance our ability to be creative.

Homeward Bound (finally!)

A second source of improved creative potential is the expansion of the viable home studio. It is an unsung virtue of home studios that they are generally very good settings to get creative magic happening. Most of the pro studios’ virtues fall into the ‘hospital’ category, while most home studios are more like escape hatches from the stresses of everyday life. Like Les Paul, you too can take advantage of this for fun and profit. Even though the pro studios try for a “good vibe,” it is usually executed through a boutique-like opulence and elegance that is often more intimidating and uncomfortable than not. I once got involved with a folk artist that really was most happy playing in a kitchen, sitting around a kitchen table with coffee, donuts, wine or whatever, jammin’ with his buddies. Utterly homey and funky. He hated studios and was never successful playing in them. The solution to his problem was finally to go on location and record him in a kitchen. We booked a small resort off-season and put him in the kitchen with the console and recorders in the dining room. We took our lumps sonically in order to get his musical performance up to snuff – a sensible and successful tradeoff.