Recording - January 2015 - 48

Part 1: Let's Get Started

By Paul J. Stamler
Hello, and welcome to a new series aimed at readers who are just
beginning their journey into the fascinating, addictive world of sound
recording. (Along the road I'll include information and discussions that will
be useful to people who've been at this for a while-so, experienced people, stay with me.) True to the theme, the series is called First Steps.
When the Editor asked me to do this series, I was honored. But I was
also faced with a large question: what would be the spine of the series?
The late singer, writer, and humorist Lee Hays (he sang bass in The
Weavers) once said that an article, book or magazine series always
needs a spine-a framework on which all the ideas hang. I decided that
the spine for this series would be a case study: I would take a clip from a
recording I had made and pick it apart. I'd analyze the choices I'd made,
and relate them to the infinite possibilities inherent in the modern recording process.
The clip
You can download the sound clip at http://is.gd/RECFirstStepsClip1.
It's from a klezmer song written by Mordechai Gebirtig and first published
in 1929, in Krakow, Poland. The artists are (left to right in the stereo
image) Dana Hotle on clarinet, Will Soll on vocal and tenor banjo (he also
plays guitar and various mandolins, though not on this track) and Shlomo
Ovadya on electric bass (he also plays percussion instruments, again not
on this track). They perform together as Ottoman Underground, and in my
biased opinion they're the best klezmer band in town. My deepest thanks
to the three of them for agreeing to be my ukis for this project.

They included:
~ Mic choice
~ Direct injection (DI box)
~ Mic preamp choice and settings
~ Equalization (EQ)
~ Compression
~ Digital recording (hardware and software)
~ Use of a console
~ Mixing
~ Panning
~ Reverb
Et cetera. The fact that this "simple" recording incorporates much of the toolset of modern recording makes
it an ideal spine to hang the series on. We'll follow
those elements through the recording process, and use
them as jumping-off points for more general discussions.
For instance, as we discuss the mic choices I made
for this session, I'll talk about the types of microphones, their directional characteristics, their frequency responses (and how to read a response curve),
along with other quirks that can affect the recording,
like proximity effect. When we get to reverb, I'll talk
about the various hardware devices that have been
used to generate reverb over the years, and their
equivalents in software. And so on.

Welcome to a new series for readers beginning
their journey into the world of sound recording...
with enlightenment for experienced recording musicians, too!
The song is called "Arbetslosen Marsch", which translates "March of the
Unemployed" (hey, it was 1929). Which begs the question: why did I
choose a song written in a foreign language (Yiddish) that will almost certainly be incomprehensible to 99+ percent of our readers?
That was deliberate on my part; the fact that most listeners won't understand the words allows them (you) to shift mental gears, and hear the vocal
purely as a sound, without the thinking brain getting distracted by meaning. This mental shift can be an extremely useful one for engineers; it lets
us put a bit of distance between ourselves and the recording, and hear the
vocal more abstractly. With extended practice, we also learn to do this
with songs we understand... but it's easier, as you're learning, if the song
is in a foreign language.
Listening to this clip will also put you in the same position I was in, as
engineer and de facto producer-because, except for a few choice words
and phrases picked up from my grandparents, I don't speak Yiddish either.
So it was sound-separate-from-meaning for me too. Besides, World Music
is big these days!
The recording sounds like a simple one: three instruments plus a vocal.
The simplicity, however, is deceptive; I used most of the techniques I know
to make it.
48

RECORDING January 2015

The Macro and the Micro
I made this recording in a studio equipped with a
large console, and did the mix on it. Most of us don't
have a console like that at home-I certainly don't,
and wouldn't know where to put it if I did. But in the
big picture, that doesn't matter. Why not?
Most of us do our recording and/or mixing using a
digital audio workstation (DAW), and most of the
DAWs out there (Pro Tools, SONAR, Cubase, Reaper,
etc.) emulate a studio setup that gelled in the late
1960s-1970s. That setup employed a multitrack
recorder (back then it used analog tape) and a big
console, with a rack of effects processors like compressors, EQs and reverbs. Nowadays the recorder is
digital (either a computer or a dedicated hard disk
recording system), the console is a window in the
DAW containing a virtual console, and the rack of
effects units is replaced by a set of plug-ins.
But again, that doesn't really matter. The computer is
emulating the old-style hardware studio; the virtual console

http://www.is.gd/RECFirstStepsClip1

Recording - January 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2015