Recording - January 2015 - 50

musicians. The simple sound of the clip
used as the spine of this series is an
example.
But here's where it gets tricky: we who
make recordings are practicing an
art/craft that incorporates a lot of smoke

Similarly, the way I made the recording
excerpted for this series has elements in
common with other recordings I've made
over the years, and written about. We
mine our own experiences every time we
step into the studio; with luck, we also

books), and Recording will revisit the topic
very soon as it does on at least an annual
basis. We'll cover the basics, though; with
luck, they'll lead you to a listening setup
that is, at least, serviceable. With care it
will let you create mixes that can be listened to in a variety of other rooms, and
will let you hear into the recording enough
to judge whether it communicates the
music from musician to listener.
Because that's what it's always been
about, from the day when Thomas Edison
spoke "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his
tin-foil recording machine. We'll talk a lot

We'll talk a lot of tech in this series, but a lot of what we cover will
be timeless, as we endeavor to answer the enduring question:
How do I make my recordings good enough
that they don't stand in the way of the music?
and mirrors. Sometimes, making a recording that sounds straight and unmanipulated... requires a lot of manipulation.
For example, to record the speaker of
Shlomo's bass amp I used a microphone
that has screaming high-frequency peaks
at 5 kHz and 7 kHz (we'll talk about what
that means in a later article). Now, if I
used that mic on an acoustic guitar or a
voice, it would sound blisteringly unnatural and I wouldn't like it. But there are two
things it does really well: it picks up the
skin sound of a hand drum like a
bodhran, and it adds some sparkle to the
sound of a guitar or bass speaker at precisely the frequency where the speaker is
running out of steam. It does those things
so well that, after I reviewed this mic for
the magazine, I bought two of them! In
this case, it made the bass speaker sound
realistic, believable and good. Smoke
and mirrors.
Echoes
If you've read Recording for a while,
you may feel your back-brain occasionally tingle in recognition as one of the articles in this series brings up echoes of
pieces from the past.
In many ways this is inevitable. I'm traversing territory that's not brand-new;
much of what I talk about will be stuff that
every experienced audio recordist
knows, and I've written about a lot of it in
my years with the magazine. There are
only so many ways to describe, say, what
a compressor does, and everyone writing
about audio has favorite metaphors that
pop up over and over. We do that
because they work; they communicate the
ideas effectively.
50

RECORDING January 2015

improvise new answers to new situations,
and add them to our individual and collective memories. As you get more experience with recording, you'll do that too.
Before the beginning
Before we get to any of the core topics,
though, I want to spend a little time talking
about the room in which you'll listen to the
clip and the tracks that make it up. That's
also, probably, the room where you'll listen
to your tracks and mixes-and if the room
isn't good, you can't make an informed
judgment about what you have, and your
recordings will suffer accordingly.
So that'll be where we go next month. I
don't promise an exhaustive discussion of
monitors and room acoustics; that would
take a book, or several of them (and F.
Alton Everest has already written those

of tech in this series, and some of the tech
will be of this moment, but a lot of what we
cover will be timeless, as we endeavor to
answer the enduring question: how do I
make my recordings good enough that
they don't stand in the way of the music?
Go download the clip, and listen to it.
This is a long road we've started down, but
it's gonna be fun. See you next month!
Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag.com)
is an educator in the Department of Audio
Aesthetics and Technology at Webster
University's School of Communications in St.
Louis. He's also a recording engineer, guitar
player, radio host, collector of vintage
recordings, and a music electronics enthusiast whose DIY designs have been featured in
our pages for many years.

Our first lesson: how NOT to take session notes
As I made the recording chronicled in this series, I did what I tell my students to
do: I kept careful notes of everything, from the mics I chose to the knob settings on
the preamps, equalizers, and compressors. That's always a good habit... but I made
a mistake. You see, I took my notes on the yellow pad I always carry with me into
the studio, and put the pages from that pad in a safe place. Or so I thought.
Not long after the recording session, my session notes got misplaced somewhere
in the house, and now I can't find them among the many papers I've stacked up in
the process of writing and researching a variety of projects. They're here but I can't
find them; therefore they're as good as lost.
Because a DAW takes up a lot of computer resources, I got in the habit of never
running anything on my recording PC besides my DAW, even on a modern computer that multi-tasks quite well. As a result, I didn't take notes in electronic form on the
DAW as I worked. Nor did I type my notes into the PC right afterward, save them
with the audio and session files, and make multiple backups (including one that lives
far away from the DAW computer... on a flash drive on my keychain, for example).
End result: valuable data, gone until I find that yellow pad-hopefully soon.
Learn from my mistake: take your notes carefully, get them into electronic form as
quickly as possible, and back them up properly. You'll never regret it.-PJS

Recording - January 2015

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