Springtime in New York City. The trees suddenly bloom. There is an adolescent purity in the air. Central Park awakes from its long winter sleep, and the streets fill with daring young rollerbladers. I was recently in New York, lucky to be in the greatest city in the world at the prettiest time of the year. I love traveling, especially when my goal is to make some music. This time, I went back to New York to produce a solo classical recording for Chen Kwan Yu.
Recording classical music is an entirely different art from recording popular music. I have had the pleasure of working in both environments, and like them both. A pop album takes much longer, usually a month from start to finish. By the time you finish a project, everyone knows everyone else's secrets. With classical music, recording may take only a day, or in my case three days plus editing. Everything depends on the actual performance. With pop, a lot depends on the production process. I though that it might be interesting in this article to compare these two different recording styles, and give the reader an idea of what really goes into the production of the music heard on a CD.
In the studio:
With popular music, once the songs are chosen and the keys are figured out, charts and band arrangements need to written. Then the right combination of musicians need to be hired. The right blend of musicians gives the music its own special "feel." On the day of recording, equipment, amplifiers and keyboards are brought into the studio. Drums are set up. There are a lot of people moving around and plugging things in. During all this, the engineer and the producer start "looking for the right sound." This means a couple of hours of listening to the drums, bass, and other instruments, fine tuning the sound until it's just right. Then it's time to record.
The recording is done in stages, a process called overdubbing, usually starting with a "rough" midi keyboard "track" first being transferred (dumped) from synthesizers to the master tape. This is called the "midi dump." The first group of musicians to record, usually the rhythm section (bass and drums) listen to the "rough," check their arrangements, and play along to the reference. This adds a "live" feel to the music. After the rhythm section is done, a guitarist comes into the studio, then a keyboard/pianist, soloists, percussionist, etc.
Up to now, there are no vocals. Only music. The singer then comes to the studio to begin recording his part. When the singer has finished, background vocalists are brought in, and with a few final touches, the music is ready to be mixed. Mixing is a whole new ball game. Sometimes a different engineer is asked to do the mix, sometimes it's the producer. It all depends. The purpose of the mix is to customize each song by carefully adjusting the volume, equalization, reverb, and adding special effects to each part. A good mix may take days, as the engineer creates a vivid musical image with the sounds recorded on tape.
The last stage in the technical process is mastering. The mastering engineer puts the songs in order, determines the spaces between songs for effect, and adjusts the sound of each song to give the entire recording its own mood. I look at mastering as a way of smoothing out all the songs, before making the first production CD.
It's a funny feeling spending so much time, organizing so many people, spending so much money, and walking out of the mastering studio on the last day of production with only a CD in your pocket. This CD is very important though, as it will be sent to a factory where hundreds of thousands of copies are made from it and distributed to record stores where hopefully someone will buy it.
Classical:
My reason for going back to New York this time was to record Chen Kwan Yu, who was giving a recital at Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center. He had been preparing anxiously for months, practicing 6-8 hours a day, memorizing and perfecting his performance. My original plan was to record him live during the concert. I felt it would be a perfect measure of his achievements. Here was Kwan Yu, 30 years old, living in New York City, playing at his highest level of musicianship, and performing some of the most demanding piano music of all time, Chopin, Liszt, and Ravel. Unfortunately, due to complicated union rules and regulations in New York, we could only have 20 minutes before the program to set up microphones and adjust the sound before he began his concert. In my experience, this was not enough time to get the best sound, so I decided to wait until after the performance, and go to a top recording studio to recreate his concert.
As I mentioned before, recording classical music is absolutely different from recording popular music. The first thing we needed to do was locate a good sounding recording room. Sometimes a church will do, or a good concert hall. Luckily enough, I found a studio that had a perfect size room for recording solo piano, about 50 pings, with 2 1/2 story ceilings. The room had been "tuned" by professionals during its construction to accurately represent the sounds produced in it. Recently Placido Domingo had recorded there, so I knew Kwan Yu would be excited.
Once the room was taken care of, I needed to contact the right engineer, someone who understood the complexities of the piano. The piano is one of the hardest instruments to record since it is capable of making so many different sounds. The engineer I chose was a piano perfectionist, known for his "audiophile" quality recordings for Chesky Records. He likes to use his own equipment, much of which he made himself, and can get the most amazing sound out of a piano. His technique is called "minimalist miking" which means finding the most natural and clear sound, as true to the original, with as few microphones as possible. After the engineer was decided, all we needed now was a world class instrument to begin recording. After some searching around, we decided on a 9' 6" Bosendorfer Imperial grand piano which would be brought to the studio and tuned by a Bosendorfer tech between each song. For me it had the best balanced tone for playing the kind of romantic repertoire Kwan Yu wanted to record.
As I mentioned before, for classical music the most important point is to capture the best performance. As the music is all memorized, and the performer can play the same thing a million times, the idea is to coax the finest performance out of the musician. A technically perfect "take" is not always the best. In classical music, we need to capture the feeling. As Kwan Yu was warming up, I was enjoying myself with a cup of coffee watching the engineer run in an out of the studio checking on the sound. He was only using two microphones, which were about 8 feet away from the piano, and had for about an hour and a half been moving then around in 2cm increments up and down, then left and right. He had worked up a heavy sweat. "I don't think there's enough richness in the bass," I said. "Neither do I," he agreed. "We must move the piano closer to the wall!" Then he rushed back out again to roll Kwan Yu, still practicing, closer to the wall. "There," he said. "That's much better." And to tell you the truth, it really was much better. "A room is like a woman," he told me later with a sly grin. "You need to find the right spot to make her come alive." Now we could begin recording.
Communication with the artist during the recording is crucial. It is easy to trip them up, or break their concentration, leading to disaster. Sometimes a conflicting musical opinion can create a problem, so the producer needs to know the temperament of his artist. I had known Kwan Yu for years, so I knew how to get him to put more life into a piece, or to slow down. He plays so well that he can play things much faster than required. "The music says agitato," I'd remind him "not super frustrato!" Or I'd say, "Piu mosso, piu mosso!! Remember to play more diminuendo." Communicating in musical terms made the whole process more meaningful, and let me pretend I was Italian for a while. We recorded three days in this manner, going through his repertoire piece by piece, first recording an entire take, sometimes as long as 18 minutes, then going back to listen for musical content. If there was some spot that seemed too rushed, or not convincing, we'd redo that particular section until it felt right. Needless to say, one long piece of classical music like Chopin's Scherzo #4 might have 10 or 20 different takes, some only four of five seconds long, needed to fix a wrong note, or maybe a whole long section necessary to capture a certain mood.
After everything was recorded, and I felt that we had all the best possible performances from Kwan Yu, the engineer and I began the editing process. Modern editing is a remarkable process involving copying all the recorded music from tape through digital filters into a computer where it can be viewed as waves and marks on the screen. Through an intricate process of cutting and pasting, listening over and over to the same thing, and some more cutting and pasting, all the pieces of the song are put back together to make for one beautiful and amazing performance. Editing is an essential part of the classical music recording process, yet most people have no idea that what they hear on the final CD is not exactly as it was performed. Many feel that editing is cheating, that what is on the CD should be exactly what happened at the recording, but I disagree. The studio is an artificial atmosphere, a very cold and impersonal environment. It is not like a live performance in front of an audience. For the performer, an audience is very important. There is some unspoken communication that occurs between the musician and the listener, leading to magnificent performances, but in the studio the only audience the performer has is the engineer and the producer. My job as producer was to be the Alice Tully Hall audience for the musician. I needed to imagine the best and most touching performance, and use any tools available to capture that perfect "performance."
Once we had edited all the music to everyone's liking, I sat amazed as the engineer pushed a button on his keyboard, looked up at me, and said. "I'm printing your CD right now to that little box over there." What an amazing world this is I thought. Music that was originally written in the 19th century by hand and ink on paper was now being written to a CD drive from an Apple computer. Here I was, a Japanese/American producer, sitting with Kwan Yu, a talented Chinese musician, who had just performed music by Polish and French composers on a German piano. The music was recorded on Swiss, German, and Japanese equipment in a New York studio. Just at that moment, I looked out the window and saw a pretty woman on rollerblades whoosh by. Meanwhile the little green light on the CD drive blinked away to a digital beat. Somewhere inside that machine was a perfect piano performance.
Chopin would never have believed this...
<< Previous How Music Really Works | Song Of The Wind Next >>