Recording - November 2014 - 44

By Paul J. Stamler

Some of the greatest recordings ever made are the
jazz records of the late 1950s-early 1960s, featuring
artists of the caliber of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus,
Paul Chambers, Booker Ervin-that crowd. These
records don't just feature great playing; they're also
among the best sounding records ever made.
What made them sound so good? Is it that they
were recorded using classic vacuum tube microphones like the Neumann U 47, plugged into excellent mic preamps and mixing electronics (also
tubed)? Was it the (tubed) analog tape recorders
that were universally employed?
None of those factors hurt; using top-notch equipment always boosts the engineer's chance of making a
great recording. And let's not lose sight of the fact that
these were among the greatest musicians ever, playing
together in excellent rooms and interacting with one
another, millisecond by millisecond, inventing new
styles and textures in the wild explosion of creativity that
followed the bebop revolution of the 1940s.
But there was another ingredient in those wonderful recordings, the sonic magic that linked the performers together. The engineers of the time were
using controlled leakage to create a sense of
space-even on mono recordings-that no artificial
reverb device in my experience can duplicate.
In a way, those engineers were making a virtue of
necessity. Recording musicians together in a room,
rather than overdubbing one part at a time, was how
records were made in the 1950s. The technology of
multi-track recording was still being developed, and
the budgets of small jazz labels (or the jazz divisions
of big labels) wouldn't have allowed for extended
overdubbing sessions, much less mixdowns once the
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RECORDING November 2014

musicians had gone home. And the studios, for the most part, had no
isolation booths; those wouldn't become part of typical recording complexes until the late 1960s and 1970s.
No, the jazz producers and engineers put their musicians together
in a room because they had to. In the process they got the musical benefits that happen when the band plays together-we devoted most of
our August 2014 issue to those benefits.
Audio clips
I've put together a couple of audio clips illustrating those benefits, using
fellow members of the Original Speckled Band playing an Irish tune. You
can download the clips from http://is.gd/FrimFramClips and listen along.
Clip 1 features the three musicians (playing two flutes and a classical
guitar) sitting in a circle, with plenty of leakage happening between the
three close microphones (Neumann KM 140s on the flutes, a Microtech
Gefell M930 on the guitar). We recorded in Webster University's Studio
A, a warm-sounding room, using an SSL console and a Studer A810
analog recorder, since this session was part of the Analog Recording
Technology class that I teach. (We also did backups on Pro Tools.) For
Clip 2, we did our best to kill the leakage by putting gobos between
the musicians in an arrangement resembling the Mercedes logo; Studio
A has no iso booth, or we'd have used it.
You can hear the difference in the two recordings. Clip 1 has space
in it that sounds natural, warm, realistic, "organic"-all the adjectives
usually piled on a good recording-while Clip 2 has what I would
describe as "etched" clarity; without leakage, it sounds comparatively
lifeless and 1980s-sterile to my ears. (Many thanks to my three ukis-
Carol Clark and Tim Hirzel on flutes, Will Soll on guitar-and to the students of AUDI 3450.01, who handled the faders. You folks make it fun.)
Flies in the ointment
There are a couple of potential downsides to recording everyone at once
with controlled leakage. One is that some microphones have extremely
wonky off-axis responses, so that any leakage will sound equally wonky.

http://www.is.gd/FrimFramClips

Recording - November 2014

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