The Secret To Great Recordings

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jeff0633 said:
I'll be one to disagree. It's the room BY FAR that is the biggest difference between pro sounding recordings and crap home recording. The player doesn't have anything to do with the quality of a recording. You can make a great recording of someone puking. That doesn't mean someone would love the sound of it, but it would be a great recording of puking. Look at sound effects libraries. These aren't good players cause no one is playing, but you can still hear the quality recordings. So for me, the room is far and away the biggest factor in a pro recording and second place isn't even close. Go read everything from Ethan Winer and then come tell me the room isn't the number one thing. Any sound can be captured in a great recording, so a bad player even with a bad instrument can still be recorded in a pristine way.
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Totally right. A great recording has nothing to do with the performance. A great performance has nothing to do with a great recording. A great production has everything to do with both and THAT is where a great producer comes in.
 
One of the most overlooked secrets to making a good recording is to actually go record something rather than going round in circles arguing the toss about it.
 
frederic said:
I think he was just sharing an enlightening moment which for him which, was how important the performance of the musicians being recorded is compared to everything else, and I think there is merit to the idea.
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From a musician's point of view, I will do a much better performance in a good room. I think all of the above matters in terms of relavance to a great performance.
 
I did say "great recordings," but I'll go even further and posit that a great player can tonally sound pretty damn good even in a bad environment, just by the way (s)he hits the drums, frets the axe, nails the high notes...

I don't know what it is exactly, but a great player can play a very simple part and it just sonically sounds so much better than when, for example, I play it. My rendition is almost exactly like theirs, yet somehow sounds sonically far behind them.

My main point of this thread was to point out how much more important it is to put energies into getting great players than investing in yet another box of knobs. I'm a bit of a hypocrit, as I do love the boutiquey gear, but I keep hearing the sonic goodness of my older recordings with a great drummer (he was with Ben Folds for years), who just knows how to hit a drum. Now that I've got 6 channels of Seventh Circle Audio preamps, my Demeter preamp, my next door neighbor's API and tons of cool mics (Neumann on down), I'm going to get this guy back for more. Even if I have to fly him in from Nashville myself, it'll make more of a difference than any other $400 purchase.
 
Greg_L said:
It's fine. It's propping up a wobbly table in the garage. It's crammed under a table leg. I'm not kidding. :laughings:
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pearl-cast-swine.jpg
 
frederic said:
Yeah, I was waiting for someone to say that because that's true also.
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Hope he wasn't talking about taking a dump again?


For my part... the secret to a great recording is the perfect marriage of a wonderful performance of some great material with the appropriate technical expertise to capture it.

:-)
 
MCI2424 said:
Totally right. A great recording has nothing to do with the performance. A great performance has nothing to do with a great recording. A great production has everything to do with both and THAT is where a great producer comes in.
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Great post and right in line with my thinking. We are confusing musicianship and good songs with good recordings. Good songs are just that, good songs, no matter if they are recorded bad or not. Good songs don't even have to be recorded at all, neither does good musicianship.
 
That's right Fred. I simply took his words literally as he wrote them. yes, had he asked if I would prefer hearing a good song more than a horrible bunch of noise recorded in a great room with great technique (a great recording) I would choose the good song every time. Because this is a recording forum, when a man says "great recordings", I simply take him to literally mean great recordings. To me a great room that stays out of the frequencies of the instruments is vital to a great recording.

My main thought here is that I have heard literally thousands of home recorded songs on these sites for the last ten years, and I have heard so many great songs that were not done justice because they were recorded in some small bedroom with no absorption and n bass trapping and it is a shame to me when I hear that. So i am saying that the opposite from the original poster is true from my perspective. I have heard so many great performances and great musicianship be brought down because of a *poor recording* with nothing but a smear of frequencies in the low end, comb filtering and such. The songs were good, the recordings were not. Did I still enjoy hearing the songs, sure I did but I would have enjoyed them much more had they been recorded in a better environment that allowed me to actually hear the good musicianship in a more pristine way.

So when I see the words "secret to gret recordings" and then the third option is that a good recording doesn't involve a good room, well, that just doesn't fit with what I have learned all these years. To me, I can simply walk in to a room and hear if I will be able to get a good recording for the most part. I would venture that any good engineer can do that, just by a clap of the hands or a short verse of singing. So yeah, just a disagreement on the meanings is all we have here.

Thanks


frederic said:
Fair enough, we are using somewhat different definitions and that's AOK.

But honestly, would a man taking a dump, regardless how perfect it was recorded, be in your playlist?

Probably not, right?

Anyway, I personally don't think the OP was actually saying recording equipment, rooms and technique matters naught. I think he was just sharing an enlightening moment which for him which, was how important the performance of the musicians being recorded is compared to everything else, and I think there is merit to the idea.

I can also personally relate to this because back in the late 80's, early 90's when I owned a pro studio, most of the garage bands that came in to record were astoundingly terrible. But, they paid by the hour and by the foot, so if they want to come in and play out of tune, argue with each other, and throw pizza slices at each other while throwing a fit, by all means, feel free and the clock is ticking.

I see where you're coming from, and hopefully you see where I am coming from as well. I think we just interpreted the OP's intention differently, and in my book that's fine.
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Todzilla said:
I did say "great recordings," but I'll go even further and posit that a great player can tonally sound pretty damn good even in a bad environment, just by the way (s)he hits the drums, frets the axe, nails the high notes...
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A great player will sound better than a mediocre player but that doesn't mean he will sound good in a bad environment. What happens if the room has a resonance of a low B and the music he is playing in G? What happens if every open D he plays buzzes? What happens if the G string is a few pennies off and/or the drums need tuning? It sounds like crap. A great player will fix all that first prior to make a recording. That's part of what makes him a great player. It's not just the audio engineer that considers the variables. A great palyer knows the value of his surrounding and the tools he works with.
 
jeff0633 said:
Great post and right in line with my thinking. We are confusing musicianship and good songs with good recordings. Good songs are just that, good songs, no matter if they are recorded bad or not. Good songs don't even have to be recorded at all, neither does good musicianship.
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It's worth noting that the purpose of audio recording is to capture good performances, not to showcase a room. Good recordings are also fairly relative to the subject. To beat your Foley example into the dirt....A good room may be important to a Foley session. It may be the single most important thing to a good/accurate recording. For those of us that are actually recording musicians, the room is important. But it is not as important as good musicianship. If all you want to do is be accurate, then the moment the electrons start flowing, accuracy moves a few seats down in the bus. A good studio monitor is accurate. It's not, however, pleasing to listen to in a non critical environment. It's flat. Our ears are not.

The room is important. There are recordings in sub optimal rooms that sound great. Ergo, the room is not the single most important element in a good recording. I don't know why this is so hard to grasp. A good room may make the recording session easier (it does), possibly more efficient (it can) and even possibly more accurate (it will be). Easier + efficiency + accurate does not equal good in every instance if the performance is deemphasized.
 
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