Recordings have changed how we listen to music and how the audience receives it. The space, the purpose and the attitude of the audience has changed since they were invented and popularized. Every performance is different from the other, as we cannot do the same performance twice.
As a performer musician and a learning sound engineer I have some opinions about recordings and I am aware of what recordings mean and what is done with them in order to get the final product. Recordings are not how musicians would perform a piece, they are the best version of the performer, or at least that is how I see them. To get a recording from a classical music piece or movement, the musician first has to rehearse and practice the piece up to a performance level. Once the musician has that, in the studio the musician does several run through of the movement they want to record. After that they listen to the material and decide if among the different takes (every separate run through individually) there is at least one passage that is “perfect” from the point of view of the musician. If that condition is made, then the sound engineer is the one responsible to take the different fragments of “perfection” and assemble them together in one final track (in a Digital Audio Workstation, every separate line, either mono or stereo) that is ready for post-production process. In this post production process some reverb and very rarely compression will be added in the case of classical music. In other styles of music this whole process is completely different.
Studio recordings in essence are musicians showing their best or the best that they could achieve. Sometimes what could be done is record the piece or movement by fragments or passages individually, not having to play the whole movement for the recording. This is the most common method used in pop music, they record phrase by phrase until they achieve the desired result. Another difference between pop and classical music from the recording part is that all the takes are rarely done at the same time. First a back track is mounted by midi instruments, including a click (metronome) to guide the singer or musicians and make them all play or sing at the same tempo. This back track includes more or less the whole composition separated in different tracks that can be muted separately for the musician to record their part while the musician listens to the whole picture except for their line that will be muted to record their part or the fragments of it. In pop music the assembling of the voices is easier because you just listen to the different takes from the ones that have been recorded and choose the best one, not having to worry about the coherence of the phrasing between two different takes that sometimes appear when editing classical music. The post production process in pop music has many other things, as this process in itself has its own artistic part and plays an important role in the result of the song.
In Jazz music is a style of music that is in the middle and both kind of recordings can be found. Recording a jazz combo in live situation, as if it was a performance, is one of the most challenging things to achieve for a sound engineer. I currently don't have enough knowledge to be able to record this type of music for this reason. Jazz combos are normally not an acoustically balanced situation by themselves, for example a double bass doing pizzicato can’t compete with the volume of the drums. The drummer would have to play very soft for us to be able to hear clearly the double bass. This happens with many instruments in jazz combos and the drums. For example a very common solution that is done in this situation is to choose directional microphones (receive sound from a specific area and less signal from other areas) to try to get as least sound as possible from the drums to get into the track of the rest of the instruments. In Jazz music the more important process is the balance of the combo. As mentioned earlier, Jazz music is normally not a well-balanced musical performance and it needs to be balanced externally. This also happens in a recording scenario. The method of recording is similar to the one we find in classical music, it is done by doing different takes of the same theme and the best fragments are afterwards put together into one final track. Once the balance process is done and the track is edited, then some reverb and some compression are introduced into the recording. A reverb is all sound that is not coming directly from the source of the sound, it is the reflections from the room. This effect can be done acoustically, recording the performance in a hall and putting microphones close to the opposite wall of the hall were the musicians are playing, or it can be added with digital reverbs, process that emulates this effect, as if the music was played in a different room. The process of compressing a track is lowering the volume of the loudest parts and increasing the volume of the whole take. With this we will achieve a more equal sound in all parts of the instrument or the track. This both processes can be added individually by track or to the final track, which is called normally stereo mix.
In this research I have explored some of the usage of recordings and what it influence our playing, as well as how the audience has changed from the pre-recording era. What do we music students use the recordings for. Psychology and educational researches have concluded that recordings are useful in teaching and learning processes. We want to focus in this research in how much they are used and up to what point they are used by students. The research questions we want to ask are:
- How much do students use recordings from other musicians as a tool during the process of learning a certain piece or movement?
- How much does listening to this recordings influence the artistic development of the students?
Recordings / Musicians and audience