At 3:23 PM -0700 7/26/06, Chuck Israels wrote:
I wrote a short solo for the lead trumpet player in the Metropole
Orchestra, marked it mf, and it was beautifully played and in just
the right proportion in the performance - coming from the back of
the band with a little distance to the sound. It was just as I
imagined it would be. But the recording engineers "corrected" the
balance so that the solo sounds up front and pretty loud, taking
away the intended effect. Stuff like that happens all the time,
score reading engineers or not.
All too often, the engineer has the last word, and I find in my own
case, that learning to hear the balance in a mixing session is quite
a different exercise than hearing it from the poduim. It takes me
many times through before I even get close to a recorded balance
that simulates the effect I believe I am getting in a performance,
where there are spatial and visual cues that add a lot to the
experience.
I know EXACTLY what you mean, Chuck. And I think there are two
factors at work. The most important is that live performance and
recorded performance are two different art forms, and have to be
approached differently. In each form, some things are easy to
achieve, some more difficult, and some impossible. And the "things"
are different in the two forms. The old idea that a recording
captures a live performance lasted up until about 1967, when the
Beatles were no longer performing live. They used studio effects on
the "Sgt. Pepper" album that were impossible to duplicate live, and
from that time on more and more recordings followed that model.
The second factor is more subtle and more insidious, and very
difficult to avoid. We CAN take more control in the studio than we
can in live performance, so we feel that we SHOULD take more control
and tweak things until they're perfect. I can't tell you how many
sessions I produced where I kept tweaking the faders up to bring out
this or bring out that until my engineer just reached over me and
pulled them all down so we weren't redlining the VU meters! He
threatened to add a producer's knob to the board, so I'd have
something to twist that wouldn't actually do anything!
The sessions I'm thinking about were the annual albums my college
show group produced in a professional studio. My charts worked great
on stage, where there was space, but tended to be too
thick--sometimes MUCH too thick--in the studio. These were sold as
souvenir albums, so I didn't rewrite anything, but I was definitely
writing for stage rather than studio. Yup, two different art forms.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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