Recording - March 2011 - 50

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STUDIO
Three Scenes For Violin and Piano
By Gary Eskow

Recording Not Forgotten:
Not Forgotten: Three Scenes For Violin and Piano is an important piece for me, and after rehearsing the work thoroughly with Quan Gi and Ben Laude I decided to find the very best studio I could afford to track and mix in. I had been hearing a lot of good things about BiCoastal Music, Hal Winer’s facility located just north of Manhattan, so I booked a 4-hour session there. Quan recently completed a Masters Degree at Juilliard and immediately took an open seat in the New York Philharmonic string section, competing successfully against 300 or so other talented violinists. She’s good! So is pianist Ben Laude, who’s also at Juilliard, pursuing a Doctorate. I liked the sound—perhaps more accurately, the lack of coloration—of BiCoastal Music immediately. The room seemed devoid of all extraneous frequencies, and when I sat down to play the piano (a 9' Steinway Model D) I noticed how evenly the entire range of the instrument projected through the ambient space. Equally impressive was the fact that the overtone series had a natural and pleasing resonance, with none jumping out offensively. When he was outfitting his control room, Winer considered a number of boards before purchasing an SSL C200 digital console. “I needed the ability to reset quickly,” says Winer, “and that precluded any analog desk. The C200 is very neutral sounding, and it allows me to hear mic and mic pre choices clearly.” BiCoastal features a Pro Tools HD4 Accel system. All A to D conversion is executed at the SSL console. Signal is then ported into Pro Tools via AES/EBU connections and a 192 digital interface. Mic choice and placement After consulting with Daryl Bornstein (a highly regarded chamber music recordist and mixer and frequent BiCoastal client), Winer decided to track the piano with two pairs of Schoeps microphones. “I spaced a pair of wide cardioid mics, one over the treble strings and another over the bass. We also used a cardioid ORTF, at the bend in the rim.”
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RECORDING MARCH 2011

Piano and strings in a magical recording session

“The combination of wide cardioid (which is almost an omni) and the regular cardioid makes for a more complex representation of the instrument. I’m capturing the piano from four locations; the cardioids are more present and pointed, the wide cards rounder and fuller. We mix them together to taste.” Quan’s violin was tracked with both a Schoeps Cardioid and Brauner Cardioid, on loan from fabled engineer Neil Dorfsman, both placed approximately two feet about the instrument. We tracked the three movements (which total about 15:30 in length) in just over three hours. Edit decisions and decisive edits I took copies of both the 24- and 16-bit files back to my studio and put together an EDL (edit decision list) the next day by loading the 16-bit files into Steinberg Cubase 4. Had I been compiling final edits myself I would have used a mastering program like Steinberg’s WaveLab 6, but I was only interested in making rough edits, and I’m more comfortable in Cubase. My only composition question dealt with the last page of the final movement. Endings are difficult! I thought I might make some cuts so I recorded everything I considered using. In fact, I did cobble together an edit that was an improvement over the original. After receiving my EDL in an email, Hal made the final edits. I do okay when I make edits, but these were perfect. What’s the secret to making a seamless series of edits? “I followed along with the PDFs of the scores you’d sent me,” says Winer, “and staggered edits as necessary. Since both instruments were live in the room, they naturally bled into each other. But there’s enough isolation so that if one instrument hangs over an edit longer than the other I

Recording - March 2011

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