by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
TAPE-WISE TRICKS
Is it still possible to produce a semi pro recording of your nonprofit entertainment group-chorus, glee club, high school band, church choir, musical show, bell ringers and a hundred other enterprises-and follow through to an LP and/or cassette, hope fully available to the general public? Well, of course! There never was more and better equipment than right now. If you have money, you can buy anything, and that means all the way from the services of a major record producer, say RCA, through quantities of excellent small concerns and one man recording operations. Or you can buy your own recording equipment and do it yourself, at least as far as the finished tape, reel to reel. (Cassette recorders, no matter how good, do not rate in this league.) Unfortunately, we don't all have money and the prices have gone up to painful levels, as you may have discovered. And then there is digital. Must everything now be digital? Digital, we hear (quite correctly), is horribly expensive. Generally speaking, you can't edit it-the essential for any publication of your recording-short of using some incredible thing costing maybe $100,000. Does this spell the end of small-time recording enterprise? Well, if you'll put up a stiff back and forget digital, for the time being, I as sure you that you will survive handily.
You will not be priced out of the market, unless dozens and dozens of still available, still operating, state-of-the art, reel-to-reel analog recorders suddenly vanish overnight, along with mil lions of dollars worth of ancillary equipment for the production of top-quality recordings. The situation here is much as it is elsewhere-we boast the finest and most varied recording equipment ever seen and heard, nor was there ever a better time, technically speaking, to produce your own semi-pro records. Even the pressings are vastly improved over the sadly noisy products I remember from a dozen or so years ago. Yours can be every bit as smooth and quiet as those you buy in the professional lines--and sometimes your cassettes will be even better than commercial ones because in that area, mass production requires high-speed duplication; your relatively small production runs can be economically produced at lower speeds and thus with potentially better quality.
Digital will come to all of us, you may be sure, but in its own good time. The fact is, I must say, that this genuinely revolutionary new electronic technique is actually more important in the line of technical procedure, making for new flexibility in the engineering sense, than as a revolutionary sonic advance.
Sounds crazy (in view of all you have heard) but it is true.
When it comes to recording your high school band, present-day digital methods will merely cost you more, for an end improvement on present LP and cassette that for the most part will not be noticeable to your audience.
Let's be realistic. Other things count.
Not all of your listeners-very few-will have the super-expensive playback systems to fully reproduce those added digital virtues, ultra-clean sound and, in particular, very wide dynamic range. The world of sound is not necessarily all audiophile.
Very simply, digital will not seriously intrude, in semi-pro record making as elsewhere (unless we let it), until it is cheap enough and simple enough so that it undercuts present analog. That I think is eventually inevitable. But not yet. When indeed this actually hap pens, not so far in the future (via the usual chips, ICs prefabricated and mass produced), then we in the modest economy of the semi-pro recording area will benefit as much as anyone else. Look at the already established examples. The home computer, the pocket calculator, the all-electronic watch. That's us in the future.
Meanwhile, if you just happen to have access to a digital recorder, if you can afford the cost without strain, or can beg, borrow or temporarily steal one, you might just try. Digital now carries enormous prestige. It puts your recording in the gold credit card category, even if an analog job might be just as good for your purpose. But move carefully! You must always edit your recording-session tapes in some fashion, if only to remove the garbage before, between and after the relevant material. Be absolutely certain that in borrowing or hiring a digital recorder, you are not painting yourself into a corner with it: Be sure that the digital follow-up procedures are available to you, right through to the cutting of your disc or the duplication of your published cassette, and that you can afford whatever all this may cost. Also, that the persons who must do your editing will work to your artistic satisfaction, preferably with yourself hovering over one shoulder in very close attendance. Otherwise, you may end up with a digital disaster. Lovely sound quality, but what happened to the last five notes of Band II?
(Do you happen to know the Beethoven Coriolanus Overture, the one that begins with what sounds like a series of enormous sneezes, Aah-CHOO? I once almost died laughing at a commercial recording, actually put on the market, which to my utter astonishment omitted the first sneeze and began with the second.) All of the above sage comment, as you might guess, has come to mind as a result of my own latest semi-pro re cording sessions, one this Spring and its twin of a year ago, done with my perennial home chorus, the Canby Singers of New York, who perform, as they say, a cappella, an incorrect term for singing without instrumental accompaniment. I've been intermittently involved with attempts to record them-since they are always right at hand-ever since 1955 or so when the wonders of magnetic tape began reaching out to those of us who weren't recording professionals. These latest two sessions put me back in the business-if you can call it that-rather surprisingly, after some five years of neglect.
Recording a chorus, I can tell you, is no easy thing, especially if you try to do most of it yourself instead of just following orders. Most of my experiments, frankly, were a dead loss, either musically, or technically, or more often, both at once. Though we did progress by the early '60s where, with friendly engineering assistance and a huge two-case Ampex 350-series stereo machine, we produced the music for our two Nonesuch recordings, still now extant after some 20 years.
I got back into chorus recording for the best of reasons. When I gave up, after a series of not too successful tries that left both me and the performers totally exhausted, I had learned a very great deal about what not to do in semi-pro recording. It took me five years to digest all the no-no's before, miraculously, I began to rethink a bit and to discover in my mind some new ways that might work better for all concerned. They are worth passing on to you, even though not all are strictly audio engineering. In recording, as anybody knows, audio and music (or whatever) are inextricably combined.
Whatever affects one hits the other, and vice versa. There is nothing so dismal to hear as a superb tape re cording-in the audio of an unusable performance. Too deadly dull or, worse, too hysterically excited; or full of mistakes or, maybe, just one inflexible (and un-editable) mistake. Or, equally sad, superb sound out of wrongly placed mikes, badly balanced, emphasizing the wrong things, diminishing the right ones. It's hell, I say. Except, of course, when-miraculously everything goes right. Engineering and performance.
To achieve that on a semi-pro basis takes every bit of constructive thinking you can manage, and the worst thing you can do, I have found, is to go by the professional book, doing just what the Big Guys do. Some aspects--yes.
But nothing slavish. So, for better or worse, I'll be giving you some of my thoughts on workable semi-pro procedure, to feed into your own personal computers when next you do your own recording.
In a way it's a matter of limits. Or should I say, compromises. You have to work hard, sometimes for years, to find the well known happy medium for your situation, as between strictly pro and unfortunately amateur. That goes across the board, from performance to engineering. I've oscillated erratically, myself, over the entire span between totally pro big-time recording (which I do not do, I merely watch!) and the wholly amateur type, so deceptively easy with all those nice cassette machines in their millions hovering in every hand.
(At my most recent singing rehearsal--not for recording-two kids came into our church auditorium with their hands partly full of a few little pack ages of some sort and asked whether they could record us. I suspect they had a miniature cassette machine. I said that the church wasn't mine and they would have to see the proper authority, the caretaker in the other room.
That was the last of them. No recording was done.) In this oscillation you live and learn.
My first-ever recording of any sort was informal, around 1933. On college vacation in the big city, four or five of us discovered what looked like a telephone booth and crammed into it, to sing Thomas Morely's "My Bonnie Lass She Smileth" onto a pregrooved, uncoated aluminum, 78-rpm disc, activated automatically by a quarter. I still have that piece of aluminum some where, and if you want to hear how poor S/N can be and still allow audio intelligence to be made manifest, you should just listen. The noise is perhaps three times as loud as the signal; the disc plays only about a minute. And yet, says the intelligence unequivocally, we not only sang "faw, law, law" instead of 'fa, la, la" but we flatted almost a whole tone. Some things get through any amount of surface noise.
This year, 1983, my singers did the same music, two whole verses, without flatting, and so a 50-year wrong was righted.
At the beginning of tape I was obsessed--most of us were-with the extraordinary freedom it brought to re cording. We mistakenly thought that this meant a kind of extreme informality, where you could record any old thing without anybody even noticing.
Quite true, technically; but results were predictable, as we now can under stand. The ratio of useful material to useless audio jargon was (and re mains) about 1:100,000. There have been marginal benefits, of course, most noticeably in folk/ethnic recording where an unobtrusive presence has often brought superb recorded material, so to speak, out of the bush. But that is a special usage.
My initial enthusiastic mistake was to think that now (huzza, huzza!), I could just set up a tape recorder at the Can by Singers meetings and lo-we would have records. This was early-on, re member-we were all pretty unsophisticated then in terms of tape recording.
I recall all too well my first sessions, at a church in upper Manhattan, to which I hauled the original Ampex 600 mono reel-to-reel recorder, the first machine with two tracks on one tape (one at a time). We tried this and that, and I got nowhere. But nowhere! I didn't even know how to edit in those days. The chorus was intimidated by all the preparations--mike cable, electric connections, etc., etc. and very quickly be came uptight. This was new, remember. And I was trying to run the ma chine myself as well as conduct. Yet because nobody else was on hand just me, as usual--I could not get those singers to rise to the occasion and sing well. As everybody knows, recording can be a terrible letdown the first time, when you realize you have no audience-except a vague and imaginary one. When, just as you get nicely started, a police car goes whooping by and ruins the take, then discouragement is instantaneous. It grows, it mushrooms. I have nothing but bits and pieces of music, plus much lecturing from a frantic me, on those old tapes.
But the opposite? Let's do it like the Real Pros--schedule a formal recording session with all the trimmings. This was my next step and it did, as one could guess, produce results. But at what a cost! Didn't the pros always record for six hours at a time and al ways at three in the morning? Didn't they invariably get down 20 takes of each portion of the music in hand? We could not manage quite that, but we tried. Once, we recorded from Saturday morning until around one o'clock at night, with sandwich breaks. Ugh! If you think our published records sound a bit anemic here and there, however lovely, you will now understand. That was what I gave up for good, five years ago. Now we do it better--and I'll tell you how--later.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Sept. 1983; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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