Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits by Howard Massey

Author:Howard Massey [Massey, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, reference
ISBN: 9780879309558
Google: 6I1GbZr-SsoC
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Published: 2000-11-15T00:08:00.106522+00:00

One of the techniques that I employ is to never listen to the input signal, no matter how bad or good the digital recording system is. From the moment you put the first microphone up, if you only ever listen to it through the complete chain, through all the converters, you’ll be guided in your decisions much more accurately. You may discover that the mic isn’t such a good choice in that particular situation, or that it should be positioned slightly different, or processed slightly differently. The problems come if you start off with an analog mindset.

I remember being hired to do an orchestral session some years ago and I was told I had to record it on an ADAT. I’d never actually heard of an ADAT at that point, so I asked what it was and I was told, “It’s really bad-sounding.” [laughs] I just did my thing of not listening to the input signal at all; instead, I listened to every mic through the ADAT and based every decision on how things sounded through that chain, and you know what? It turned out pretty good.

With that approach, the focus shifts from trying to capture the original sound as accurately as possible to instead trying to craft as good a sound as possible through the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters.

Exactly. As I see it, the whole thing is about bottlenecks, whether that bottleneck is 44.1k or 16-bit—they’re all bottlenecks. So if you actually engineer through the bottleneck, you’re going to come out with a much better result. After all, no one other than the people in the studio know what the input signal actually sounded like, so it becomes irrelevant, really—it’s there only for the duration of the session, and it’s heard only by the people in the studio. What carries through is what people hear at the end of the bottleneck.

“The whole thing is about bottlenecks. So if you actually engineer through the bottleneck, you’re going to come out with a much better result.”

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