How did you start recording musical artists?
We began 20 years ago with a solo piano album recorded in Zipper Hall, which is a beautiful 430 seat concert hall right across the street from what became Walt Disney Concert Hall [in L.A.]. We had wonderful microphones, two [Neumann] U 47s, I believe. We recorded with about a 10-hour microphone and hall set up. The techniques have remained fairly much the same since then. We usually use classic, vacuum tube microphones. Those U 47s, I think, were from the early 1970s. The microphone I use the most now is an AKG C24 stereo mic from 1969, I believe, which used to belong to Frank Sinatra. From the microphones, we then go straight to our recording media. No mixer. We are also now using SonoruS Audio's Holographic Imaging to capture and incorporate two rear channels so that we can also release surround sound for NativeDSD [Music, audio download site]. Multi-channel is now our norm, as well as the stereo album. We go from our microphone through a Yarlung microphone preamplifier – designed and made by Elliot Midwood for us – and then from there we go straight to the analog tape deck, our SonoruS ATR12. And to record high resolution, we use the Merging Technologies Hapi recording at 256 fs DSD. We also use the SonoruS ADC to capture high resolution PCM. Essentially three different originals split off of the same signal coming from the microphones and the microphone preamps. And that's it. The challenge with this – as you know perfectly well from setting up in very difficult situations outdoors – is that once we have the recording, that's the recording. The mixing and mastering, so to speak, happens onstage with the musicians. If we want to change the EQ, we do that by changing the microphone position or adjusting the acoustics in the hall beforehand. If we want to change the depth of the recording, then we do so in-person, physically onstage. It’s such that once we have the recording captured in its three different media, that's what gets released as analog tape, CD, high res downloads, or MP3s. That's what the end-user hears. It's very simple and it's also excruciating. [laughs] The musicians know this in advance, and I prepare them so that our first day is essentially a setup day. I've learned that on the setup day we don't have the musicians perform any of the music that we're planning to record, because I don't want the musicians to have already worn it out when we do the recording itself. Instead, those moments can then be the fresh takes, after I'm not making any more changes with the microphone setup, with the hall, or anything. For the practice day, we use other material that has similar peaks and loud passages while we get everything set right technically. But avoiding the core material during the setup process helps the musicians to not already get bored with the repertoire that we’re all there to capture.
When you say changing the acoustics of the room, do you mean by utilizing the baffling in some of these halls to soften the sound?
Yes. Zipper Hall, for example, has six different curtains that we can move, located up in the ceiling. The Samueli Theater in Costa Mesa [California] has curtains that can be pulled to any location along the sidewalls in the balcony and behind, so that can affect how much natural decay there is. Since we aren't adding reverb in the post-production process – actually, we don't really have a post-production process – we then have to make sure that the natural reverb and the natural decay is what we want in the concert hall. That's what takes a lot of time figuring out. We used to think we could do this in headphones, but I'm not good enough to be able to guess about what I can hear in headphones and know how that will translate to the end listener. I do use headphones during the recording sessions, but not for the soundstage and not for the ambience in the hall. For that, we set up in a separate space, usually a different room – a playback room – which we laboriously adjust with speakers and compensations in the room to make sure that the sound is as close as what we can get, in terms of the soundstage. We then take a thumb drive from the recording in the concert hall, go to the listening room, and play the recording there with the musicians to figure out what changes we want to the sound. What changes we might want to make during that setup day. We only listen back the first day, when dialing in the technical elements.
I feel similarly that recording and listening are two different activities. When musicians stop to listen it can kill the momentum of the creative process itself, and often they become judgmental, self-conscious, or get stuck in their heads.
