Preface

This book serves as an introductory text to fundamental principles of digitally recording and editing acoustic music in ambient spaces. It focuses on stereo microphone techniques in classical genres to help performers unaccustomed to recording environments understand the processes involved in crafting records. Musicians spend thousands of hours preparing for the concert platform but relatively little time (if any) learning how to turn those performances into recorded sound. A concert hall recital, replicated in front of microphones, rarely produces a satisfactory outcome on a distribution medium such as the compact disk or mp3, for the methods engineers and producers use to shape what listeners hear through loudspeakers have an enormous impact on the way people react to recorded performances.

In fact, sound recordings have become such an important form of musical communication that all musicians probably should familiarize themselves with the procedures employed to generate the sensory surfaces of records. By providing information on the art of committing performances to disk, this book will enable musicians to turn recitals into raw tracking data that can be digitally edited into cohesive listening experiences.

The text addresses the following topics:

Theory of Sound Recording

• the nature of soundwaves and their behavior in enclosed spaces
• the components of a recording chain from sound source to listener
• the conversion of analog signals to digital information
• resolution or sound quality in digital systems

Production

• microphones
• stereo microphone techniques
• phase issues and the “three-to-one” principle
• tracking
• critical listening

Post-Production

• digital editing—EQ, control of dynamic range, reverberation, loudness, meters
• discussion of commercial software plugins
• preparing the finished track for delivery in a variety of file types (WAV, AIFF FLAC, mp3, AAC)

Several case studies follow these theoretical sections, and they cover the basic principles behind a number of common recording situations from solo performance to various combinations of musicians and instruments—piano, soloist with piano accompaniment, and small ensembles. The book ends with an exploration of studio techniques that can enhance or replace the microphonic capture of performances in ambient rooms. In summary, the primary objective of the book is not to train musicians as recording engineers but to provide performers with a theoretical and practical understanding of how musical performance can be transferred to audio media.

The text presumes that readers are already familiar with the digital audio workstation (DAW) of their choice and know how to get sound in and out of it. Hence, instead of providing detailed discussions of specific recording software, the book introduces principles that can be translated to any DAW. The glossary contains definitions for many of the technical terms encountered in the text.