Classical and contemporary music doesn't always have to sound the same on the CD as it does at concerts!

The majority of classical music is still being recorded in the same way as it was done 50 years ago inspite of all the technological advances. Yes, it is digital now and it may be edited more but when it comes to microphone placement and the overall approach, not much has changed. The aim for most is still creating a recording which sounds as if we were listening to the piece in a concert hall. There are other ways though. Just listen to what all the other music genres are doing!

In a previous article I talked about the difference in mentality between music genres when it comes to putting a piece of music on piece of plastic. Now let's focus on the possibilities you have when you record a piece of music.

“Un-real” recordings

One thing we have to be absolutely clear about before we go any further is the fact that there is nothing “natural” about the way our loudspeakers sound. As soon as we record an instrument, any way we do it, and play it back in loudspeakers the result will always sound different than having the actual instrument in your living room. It actually sounds very different, we've just gotten used to that difference. Recording an ensemble in the nice acoustics of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam will never turn your living room into that hall. Quite far from it actually. The magic of live performance will never be captured on a CD so why even try making a fake concert experience when recording? Recordings offer other possibilities than concerts, so why not use the strength of both, where they actually work best?

Without getting too technical, let's look at what is required if you want to have good control of what is done to the sound after you make the recording, that is at the post production stage where you mix and master the recording. Basically it requires that every instrument is recorded on it's own channel, has it's own microphone (or microphones, when it comes to larger instruments). As soon as you have a very clean signal from just one instrument and not a lot of spill (sound from nearby instruments), a lot of possibilities open up.

Panning and surround

Panning is the placement of a sound in the sound field. If you're uncertain what it means, listen to a pop album in headphones. Then you can clearly hear that perhaps one guitar sounds almost only in the left ear or the backing vocal almost only in the right ear. Usually in classical recordings there is one fixed panning throughout the record and with the traditional recording techniques not much can be changed because of “phasing” problems. This will not be explained here but it's very unpleasant, trust me.

If you have each instrument recorded with a separate microphone (on a separate channel), and preferably recorded in isolation, one has full control of where in the soundfield the instrument is placed. It can be different between movements (useful if only a few instruments are playing in one movement and they all happen to be on the right side of the stage. Then you might want to spread them out a bit more). You could even have the flute jumping from left to right throughout the whole piece. Why you would want to do that I don't know, but it's possible.

The more extreme side of panning is when we are dealing with multi channel audio or surround. In those cases you could have every instrument moving in circles around you if that is what you wanted.

I have actually heard a string quartet where each instrument was placed in one speaker of a surround system. The intention was to make it sound as if you were sitting with a string quartet around you. The concept is interesting but it didn't work at all. At least not for me. There were several reasons for that. One was that the instruments didn't blend at all into one piece of music. They were too isolated to one speaker each, something you would not experience if you actually sat among 4 string players. I admit I wasn't listening to this in the best of surround systems but I don't think that was the problem. It also just felt wrong having so much of the music material in this fairly traditionally written quartet behind you. That can of course be my limitations to blame but nevertheless our ears are the shape they are to focus on things in front of us. I'm sure surround systems can be used in a more artistically interesting way than this example.

It is not the intention here to cover the possible use of surround systems. It could be a matter for a several separate articles and perhaps we could get some expert on the matter to talk about that later. I only want to point out that music recorded in this way can be spread out over more speakers and made into a different listening experience than otherwise. But, there needs to be a point in doing so, though!

Finally, I have to mention probably the most extreme use of panning. Imagine you have some music playing from your speakers and you start panning it from left to right and back again. First slowly but then you speed up until you do so maybe 25 times per second (you would not be doing this by hand). Actually, some time before you reach that you will have stopped noticing that the sound is moving between speakers, but rather percieve it as fluctuating. Then, when you are over 20 times per second the actual rate of change will start to generate pitch in itself. Our audible range is from about 20hz to 20.000hz so if the rate of change between speakers is within that range, it will generate pitch. The music you're throwing back and forth, and in itself has pitches, now gets modulated with the new pitch in a complicated way. That is way beyond the realms of this article, nor is it my speciality.

In next articles we look at dynamics in classical recordings, effects and recording with different types of click-tracks.

Next articles in series:

Alternatives to the traditional classical recording (Part 2)

Volume and dynamics in classical recordings

Related articles:

Recording and production of contemporary music

Can modern composers learn something from the production techniques used in the pop industry?