This thread discusses the Content article: Alternatives to the traditional classical recording (Part 2)

Your conclusion is pretty right on. And as a general rule of thumb, I think close mic and the tools available today give recording artists a large number of choices that can be used until experience takes over!

The microphone, like everything it is recording, is an instrument. An experienced expert with a microphone has a similar kind of control over timbre and dynamics as a cellist with a bow or the embouchure of a brass player. But it needs as much practice. And the other side of this is the wide array of signal processing that is now cheaply available to a wide range of recording artists.

Like a composer learning orchestration, a recording artist needs to start with rules of thumb and begin to experiment and explore. Recording can just as expressive as a performance, and as sampling rate and bit depth begin to give more head room in the information domain, recording artists will begin to have new dynamic and expressive room to explore. It is in the details beyond the rules of thumb that digital recording can now start to explore, but these are aspects that take much trial and error.

In other words - save, tinker and undo often!

I had a great talk with James Poke of Icebreaker (London) about this - he agrees that compression and close mics are a tool that is there within the spectrum of possibilities to be used.

To me, the classical tonmeister dogma of no compression, no close mics is a very limited view. Imagine if movies were just single-camera, single shot films of live plays. Why do people want records to be mimicry of live performance? They're records. They need to sound good through loudspeakers.

Yes, there's a place for the purist approach, but it's just one option amongst many. I like the sound of modern production techniques on classical music. So much so that I often add some processing to other people's recordings so that they are more enjoyable.

Very good couple of articles. Thank you.
I think the biggest obstacle in recording everything separately is the problem of rubato vs. the clicktrack. Would be nice to hear your thoughts on this.

I think that an ensemble of strings will always need to be recorded together for the intonation, above all else.

If a multi-tracking approach was going to be used then it should be possible to make a click-track with rubato on a modern sequencer using enough subdivisions of the beat; I remember a very early version of MOTU's Performer that had no tempo variation, but that has been incorporated for over 20 years now.

Congratulations on writing such an interesting series of articles on this hugely important area. I'm all for using any means that works to make a detailed recording that is well balanced, and allows the listener to discover a new piece of music.