Recording Class: Week 2

It's hard to distill the teachings in these classes. There's lots of folk wisdom getting thrown around.

From a technical aspect, we went over the board. Basically, he's got 32 mics coming into a board. He's also got a 24 track "tape"...which really goes to a digitil recorder now. The mics come into the board, go out and get compressed, then go on to recording...and back to board. He got an electrical engineer in the class to explain the difference in balanced and unbalanced cables...essentially a balanced cable has 3 wires...positive, negative, and ground. And the positive and negative cancel each other, which reduces noise and lets the pure signal come through. This is what XLR mic cables are. An instrument cable is usually unbalanced...which means potentially higher noise to signal ratio. Also talked about high and low impedance cables. Essentially same thing. High impedance cable has more noise. For a short distance, this doesn't really matter, though. He also briefly explaned compression. Essentially, humans can hear like 150 dB range...but machines can only record like 85-90 dB range. So compression squashes the real sound into a range the machine can handle.

He also went off on some stories about the days of musicians unions...and the pros (they'd sue for you) and cons (they took dues plus 20% when you played outside your home district...and mismanaged the money).

He brought up an 8 channel (5 mic...3 of the mics were doubled mono to stereo) recording of an acoustic guitar signal and we discussed some aspects of that. He spent a little time explaining to a guy why you might put 8 mics on a drum kit.

There was some discussion about how basically all the massaging you do during recording/mixing is to correct mistakes. A person who plays well, and balanced, basically doesn't need all this.

I asked him how you train your ear to know "bad" from "good". I don't know if he totally got the question. But basic answer was...lots of experience. If you listen to enough people recording...you hear the same mistakes over and over again. Everyone at a certain level makes the same mistakes. Then...people who are better...at the next level...they all make the same, different, mistakes.

A side story as part of his response to my question...he talked about mistakes of wrong notes and mistakes of intent. The first being something that sounds bad to everybody...the second something that sounds bad only to you. In the second case...you MEANT to play it one way...but then you got in the trance of the music and something else came out. He said that these aren't really mistakes...they should be counted as blessings and left be. He talked about how...when you really know an instrument or a part or a song...you get into a trance and you aren't really thinking about how to do it anymore. In fact, if you DO think about it too much, you mess up. I totally get this. And him bringing it up made me feel like...maybe I'm not such a lost cause after all. Maybe I really AM a musician and not just a lame poser. I find that trance sometimes. I have it in me. I've often thought that the only moments that I am totally present are when I am in this trance. There's no past. There's no future. There is only right now. And then right now is gone and there's a new right now. It is the only real, true peace I ever feel. It is magic.

So there's hope for me...but I still gotta say that I don't really know the difference between "good" music and "bad" music...at least not in fine definitions. Broadly...if something sucks I know it sucks...and if something is great I know it's great...but in the middle where it could be either...I can't tell. When people write reviews, I rarely get the fine points. Kind of like tuning...I have trouble when things get close telling what's off and what's not and in what direction.

Of course it is mostly opinion...but there's science there and intuition too that are lost on me. I think his answer got at the basic point that...it's just about listening ALOT...which I certainly don't do. I really wonder how common it is that people have this sense of what is good and what is mediocre...and how often people are full of shit when they act like they know.

I understood about 3/4 of the technical electronic stuff...the rest went past me. I've always had a mind block for electronics. Just ask Kestrel. Poor bastard was my lab partner for a semester in Vibes and Waves.