Recording - November 2009 - 6

Note to faithful writers: When sending email to talkback@recordingmag.com, please remember to include your name and where you hail from. Rickie Lee Jones’ acoustic guitar sound I just read Readers’ Tapes by Marty Peters in the July 2009 issue. In the review of the track by Jay Skinner and Tiki Lewis, Marty described Rickie Lee Jones’ acoustic guitar sound by Lee Hirschberg as, “Rarely will you come across more beautifully recorded acoustic guitars.” I purchased the song on iTunes and must agree 100% although it’s only an .m4a file. Very nice ambience sound on the acoustic guitar and everything else as well. Now my question for Marty would be if he knows the recording chain of the acoustic guitar? I googled for Lee Hirschberg but can’t find anything about him Thanks a lot in advance! Glen via email Marty Peters replies: Hey Glen, Lorenz passed along your email to me. I’m thrilled that my writeup inspired you to search out the Rickie Lee Jones track, it has long been one of my favorite recordings and one that I still use as an A/B reference some thirty years after it was recorded. As for details on the recording chain, the album was tracked in 1978 at Warner Bros. Studio in California. The guitarist who played the part was Fred Tackett, a much in demand session player (and currently a member of Little Feat) at the time. According to a wonderful article in the current issue of Fretboard Journal, Fred’s main acoustic guitars during this era would have been a S.L. Mossman dreadnaught and a Martin 00-18. As for the recording gear, one can only speculate, although the most common choices for the guitar would have been Neumann KM 84 small capsule condenser mics along with Neumann U 87 or U 67 large capsules. Other choices would have been AKG C12s and C414s. As for the preamps, Neve 1073s would certainly have been a go-to choice, and these combined with the Bill Putnam designed Universal Audio 1176 and LA-2 compressor/limiters were very much the order of the day. Finally, the use of analog tape can’t be underestimated! As for Mr. Hirschberg, his career dates back to the 1950s and he was involved in the engineering, mixing and mastering of dozens of seminal recordings by artists such as Ry Cooder and Randy Newman, along with the great string of early-to-mid-’70s Gordon Lightfoot albums. Much of his work was in conjunction with Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, two famous producers of this era. Anyway, I hope that this helps answer some of your questions, feel free to contact us any time. Happy Recording!—MP No room to audition Audition? My first issue from my new subscription arrived and I’m already aggravated. Why do you seem to always exclude Adobe Audition (formerly Syntrillium Cool Edit) from your DAW articles? I use it from recording to mastering and I love it. Did Adobe make you mad or something? I left them for aRECORDING NOVEMBER 2009 short time due to their lack of support for ASIO and went with a Cakewalk product, but once they released Audition 2.0 I was drawn back to Audition. Here are a few of the reasons I like Audition: • Does not require a dongle or specific hardware to use. (I refuse to use software that requires a dongle.) • Audition is comprehensive. As I mentioned above I can record, mix, and master with it. I can also export to any format I am interested in and burn to a CD complete with track markers. • When you consider the above, it is reasonably priced. The included iZotope multiband compressor alone helps to recover some of the cost. I find many of the other included plug-ins very useful and I have not needed to look beyond them. So no additional purchases required. Now don’t get me wrong, your magazine is a good one and I’m glad I subscribed. I have been reading Recording for 6 years now. It’s just a bit incomplete and I wish you would also inform your readers about Audition so they can make more informed decisions. I have used only a limited number of alternatives, Cakewalk and Tracktion (came with my Onyx 400F). I continue to use Audition. I have a friend who also uses Audition, but has also used Pro Tools among others recently while in college. He personally uses Audition and can’t justify the expense of going with one of the others. Neither of us has any affiliation with Adobe beyond being satisfied consumers of their product. So please keep up the good work, but add a bit more thoroughness to your otherwise great magazine. Don “Bear” Dalrymple via email Don, thanks for your letter. I was wondering when someone who does everything in Audition or Sound Forge was going to write in and ask about the omission. Adobe themselves position Audition as a software application primarily for soundtrack recording and development, with multitrack playback/editing supported primarily for compositing purposes; they do talk about support for up to 80 live inputs, but this wasn’t what Audition was originally designed for. If they’re trying to reposition it as a direct competitor to established music studio tracking and mixing software, we’re not seeing much evidence of that. While some people do use Audition for all their musical needs, it’s really not a DAW in the standard sense of the word. It may be comprehensive for you, but I’d go nuts if I tried to do music with only Audition, if only because its MIDI capabilities are very primitive. We’re well aware that with every upgrade and added feature set, the lines between wave editors and DAWs get more and more blurry, but for now we plan to group Audition along with products like Sound Forge, WaveLab, Soundtrack Pro, and Peak, each of which is also trending toward being a mini-DAW as features get added on. And we will gather up and talk about those kinds of applications in a future issue! Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to get good information from Recording every month.—MM

Recording - November 2009

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