Things We Can Learn From These Techniques For Multitrack Work

About Coaches

We all need coaches - people who observe our work and help us maintain our top performance. The classical folks have this down pretty well in general - the good ones never stop taking lessons. But the idea of having a coach at the session, while obvious when you think about it, just isn’t done very much. In this case it helped a great deal. Along with the additional emotional cheering section (the studio is a lonely, lonely place, remember), having a vocal coach who knew Kyoko and her voice intimately really helped keep this session out of trouble. It’s worth thinking about.

Incidentally, I had a coach,too! Curt Wittig, an immensely experienced and talented classical engineer from Washington, DC, came to the sessions to keep me out of trouble. The extra pair of experienced ears was a godsend. Actually, Curt and I have gotten into the habit of backing each other up whenever we can. It really makes a difference!

Scheduling

Our time window was really a little too tight. If there was one place this production could have come unglued, it was in the scheduling. Ideally, Kyoko should have taken another day off, after the first day of recording. It really hurts the quality of performance to force the production pace. We were lucky in this regard. If anything had gone wrong, the production might have crashed – not enough reserve time.

The effect of the room

While really pretty close to ideal for recording, the room was a little too dry for performing, if you understand the distinction. Singers, especially, work the room they’re in. They need reverberance to support their voice and allow them to relax. The absence of reverberance caused Kyoko to push a little harder than she might have otherwise, and there was some concern at the end of the second day that she’d overdone it. The classically trained voice is a pretty delicate and highly stressed tool, and in this case the room got in the way.

Giving Kyoko headphones with reverb would’ve been useless for this kind of music. Another possible solution that has some interesting implications would be to fit the acoustic room with LARES (Lexicon Acoustical Reverberation Enhancement System) and simply dial in the reverb you want right from the start. It sure would make the performing easier, which is, after all, what we are really interested in!

Full takes vs. punch-ins

I’m always struck by how much better the performance of music is in complete takes rather than in snippets or little edit-takes. The micro-management inherent in punches and edit takes (As in, “Let’s take the C# on the third beat of measure 27 again”) usually defeats the larger musical intensity. Note-perfect performance is oversold, and we often lose intensity in our quest for note perfection.

Good Mics

The really active ingredients, technically, in these recordings, were the microphones. Everything else (except for the truly silly use of an SSL console as a monitor mixer!) was quite modest and standard (ADAT, Tascams, etc.). This was a classy bunch of microphones, and they sure made a huge difference. Setup was comparatively simple, and the sonic quality and character of the original masters is really quite stunning! They may cost a lot, but if you have some really beautiful acoustic sounds you want to capture in stereo, any of these mics will do a really gorgeous job! I can’t think of another element in the recording chain that has nearly as much effect on the final product.

Simplicity

Simplicity is worth a lot. Technically, the way this session got done was pretty basic, with no signal processing, careful, but simple level management, and avoidance of complicated solutions to our fairly straightforward problems. Things like having Kyoko step back a foot where we needed a darker sound or more intense piano, instead of fiddling with levels in the control room, for example.

Great Artists

Finally, good recording is a little like provincial French cooking. You start with fabulous ingredients and then don’t mess around with them very much! If you want to make great recordings, record great players! Simple as that. In this case, we had the performers in spades, and all we had to do was keep the take-sheets straight, keep the artists cheerful and focused, and let the music roll! Serious fun!

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