PART 4
Common Recording Strategies

This final section considers a number of common strategies for recording acoustic sound sources through microphones, and it covers solo piano, soloists with piano accompaniment, and small ensembles, as well as studio techniques that can enhance or replace the capture of performances in ambient spaces. The descriptions of miking contained in the following chapters should, however, be regarded as guidelines, suggestions for microphone placement to be modified according to the desired soundscape for a project. Since recording has always been a highly subjective art, no single procedure should be regarded as the correct (or only) way to represent the character of either an individual sound source or a group of sources. Indeed, the decisions engineers and producers make in preparation for tracking determine, to a large extent, the nature of a recording’s sonic surface, and if the main goal is to satisfy a wide cross-section of the public, recordists must use their critical listening skills to craft a product that will suit people who have differing notions of what constitutes “good” sound.

In fact, the cumulative experience of everyone involved in a project helps them achieve a compelling balance between the spatial environment of the recording, the clarity and transparency of details, the lifelike portrayal of timbre, the faithful representation of constantly changing dynamics, and the realistic rendering of the sound sources in the stereo playback field. Finely honed analytical skills, then, which have been built, in part, on the concepts treated in the preceding sections of this book, assist producers, engineers, and performers in communicating their ideal conception of the music (in its recorded form) to audiences.