[VHS] Recording With Bruce Swedien (1997)

started for me in actuality that was my tenth birthday my dad gave me a disc recording machine for my tenth birthday and what it was was a big black box like this with a microphone you plug in and you record records discs on blank discs well after 10 minutes with that machine I knew and I was only ten years old spent 10 minutes with that machine I knew exactly what I wanted to do the rest of my life [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] when I was a kid growing up in Minneapolis I was really fortunate in the my mom and dad were very supportive of what I wanted to do because I made a mess out of the house I'd be drilling holes through the wall to put speakers through tar plaster down from the ceiling hanging speakers almost set the house on fire overloading the electrical circuits with my recording equipment it got to the point I guess when I was about 17 or 18 that I built an illegal radio station in the garage at home so I could broadcast my recordings to the whole neighborhood and mom and dad just went along with everything never never went never a whimper my early days were spent in Minneapolis recording choirs and classical music mainly there's some wonderful choirs and musicians in that area then in 1957 I moved to Chicago and worked for RCA Victor and recording the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the time under the direction of Fritz Reiner and it was a wonderful learning experience for me because dr. Reiner truly loved the recording process he really was into recordings we would sit and edit the Chicago Orchestra tapes bar by bar sometimes note by note until it was as perfect as we could possibly make it and one of the things I think that helped me the most was dr. Reiner made me part of his incredible new incentive program which was one mistake and you're through in the late fifties in the early days of my career in Chicago in the business was a wonderfully exciting time to be in the business the bands that I worked with all the major artists Count Basie Duke Ellington Stan Kenton Woody Herman on and on and on all these musicians were enthralled and really interested in the recording process although at that point the goal of recording was to pretty much present an unaltered acoustical event and but that was beginning to change so by the sixties late sixties early seventies we began to get away from reality and sound and our imagination became a part of the recording process and it's what I called the recording revolution where we went away from from an unaltered acoustic event to something that can only exist in our imagination and that's when I really got excited about what what I was doing one of the early recordings that I think of that marked a real change was Les Paul and Mary Ford's how high the moon which was a total departure from reality in recorded music and I think that what happened at that point in time popular music took a left turn away from reality in sound and we've never looked back a large portion of the record buying public decided that reality in recording was not necessary perhaps not even desirable and I think when I came along in the late 50s and and that revolution was still very much in evidence I think that's what really excited me and got me into this thing in a very big way in that my my imagination and my creativity could be a part of of what we were doing and that these sound fields that I was recording by the 1970s and and 80s would be have a big part of me in them of my imagination in them and to this day that really makes me excited I love it one thing that I think is important for anybody is in music recording is to get out and hear live music in a good acoustical situation I'll never forget when I did my first master class at UCLA I picked 10 students I had a lot of applications but picked 10 students so we had our first meeting at UCLA and I said okay gang what we're gonna do today is we're going to go hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic you should have heard the belly aching it was ridiculous oh no we don't want to hear that old stuff what what do we have to do that for I said you just listen so we all went I got seats for us right in the middle few rows back and when we got back to UCLA after the concert everybody was so fired up did you hear the presents on the violin solo did you hear the depth of the sound and the left and the right there were they were excited their eyes were as big as saucers and it's amazing and from that point on they had this mental reference of what music truly sounds like without a benchmark of live acoustical music in your mind's ear you have no grounding so to speak for your own sonic personality and I think it's very very important for that to be developed you cannot learn your craft or you cannot develop your own personality by only listening to other peoples recordings by hearing live music in a good acoustical situation it gives your ear a benchmark a starting point so to speak all music is created to be to have some acoustical support and the way sounds are perceived by us the way music is perceived is very dependent on what how we are experiences develops so get out and listen to live music not just classically music though that's a good starting point but rock and roll in a good room and and in any kind of live music and then use that experience to develop your own ear but one thing that is lacking in a lot of modern recording is the presence of truly stereophonic images and by stereophonic images i don't mean what i call to channel mono where you hear something coming out of the left speaker and something different coming out of the right speaker and that is automatically called stereo well nothing could be further from the truth stereophonic if you were to define that word means solid sound and it's the ability to recreate a sound source to be able to tell intensity differences between left and right to be able to record a stereo image and hear it sounding natural is very very important and very lacking in a lot of modern recording not to say that that all these sources have to be stereo but it's important to have some stereophonic reality in a recording for it to be emotional to me there are three dimensions to sound left-right and space front to back so stereo is not just a two-dimensional sound it's very three-dimensional at least in my mind's ear I guess at this point we should talk a little bit about microphone technique and this is a subject very dear to my heart I love Michael and and I own a hundred and five microphones there in 15 anvil cases and they travel with me to every project that I do the reason I have all these microphones is first of all microphones to me are like the magic wand of what I do there the Voodoo and every microphone has its own character its own quality and they are like different instruments to me or do let's say maybe a different color in my my palette one microphone for instance a condenser mic will sound a certain way on one type of voice or an instrument and if you put another mic like a ribbon mic or dynamic mic it will make that instrument sound another way so I use these as different colors in the palette this is a one of my favorite cases this case has to you forty sevens nine months which is the large capsule cardioid only there's au 47 fe t great vocal mic and there's a matched pair superb microphone incidentally you can use zero in on the Neyman logo okay here's a little inside dope on the gnomon logo if you see the logo that's in purple like this it means it's a field effect transistor or solid-state microphone the tube microphones the logo is black the red microphones where the logo is red I forget wood then nice but but there's three distinct colors of Newman logo and the purple his field effect transistor this is a superb mic and here's a AKG 414 a B I have two that are consecutive serial numbers and this microphone I frequently use in bi-directional as an XY pair like this this is a wonderful mic for piano recording I love this in a grand piano again X Y if you aimed it at the keys or the strings rather and then do it in this coin set in pair microphone technique is a huge subject it can take forever as a matter of fact it will be a whole tape in this series but just to touch a few of the high points for instance I love a large capsule condenser mic in the piano for a piano recording there's a perfect example of where a condenser mic works well [Music] another technique that I've used often is to use a small capsule condenser mic in a string bass or an upright bass for instance I've wrapped the the microphone with foam rubber stick it in the bridge of the base so that the capsule ends up almost under the fingerboard of the bass the resultant sound is just incredible you need an omnidirectional condenser mic to do this but this is a little trick that is just fantastic this is a very unusual microphone it's an Altec Lansing 21b condenser mic omni capsule so one of the only american-made condenser mics that achieved any real popularity this microphone was used in film quite a bit as a narrator or announcers or an interview mic where the guy would talk and then he'd interview somebody and they'd speak and so on as a matter of fact if you a little bit of history here an affair to remember there's a whole segment with Robert Q Lewis with an all tech 21 B microphone check it out sometimes this this type of microphone ok here we go you take the mic and the packing material and wrap it around the base of the microphone like this and then you put it in in the bridge of the base like this it goes in the bridge of the base and you slip it up there so that the capsule of the microphone is directly behind the fingerboard of the base okay now our trail will play a couple a few little licks and check out this base on let's do a stereo acoustic guitar recording here's B and K brew Landcare four thousand six and it's matched partner these mics were made for me in Copenhagen and matched their we'll set them up in a coincident pair set up like so and it was in Lewis if you'll sit whoops and we'll set up the mics close together capsules right angle almost and let's listen to a little bit of josé Luiz playing this is in stereo [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the perfect example of using let's say a ribbon microphone which is one of my favorite types of microphones is Michael Jackson's don't stop - you get enough the bottle percussion that's a huge part of the sonic image of don't stop to get enough at first when I thought about oh boy this is gonna be very difficult to do because the glass bottles and they were being played with with metal strikers and wooden drumsticks and so on it's gonna have a tremendous transient peak and it's gonna make the recording very difficult to do so I thought AHA ribbon microphone a ribbon microphone is not able to trace all of that transient response its response is perhaps more like that of the human ear so I used my RCA ribbon mics on on the bottle percussion in don't stop do you get enough and if the result is well you can listen to it anybody can listen to that and until it makes an incredible sonic image it's very clear and it is very loud in the recording you couldn't do that with a condenser mic the glass bottle percussion that's in that recording was all recorded with these microphones I had to RCA 44 and to RCA 77 I'll show you a 77 this is an RCA 77 DX this is a vintage ribbon microphone and very much the same as this one but a little bit different less proximity effect but very wonderful to use with with percussion instruments one problem with the vintage ribbon mics though is that they're quite fragile and by that I mean they don't take any abuse at all you don't want to go testing because you can just about destroy of wonderful night like this there a couple little tricks though if you see this mic from the side okay the ribbon is actually suspended in this plane here and what I found out years ago is if you have the mic like this in other words in an absolutely vertical position the Freak the high frequency response is pretty much up to spec but if you want to add a little bit of high frequency boost all you do is tilt the mic this way and what happens is gravity puts a little bowl in the ribbon tightens it up and adds about 3 dB at 10 kilohertz I'm frequently asked about microphone placement in when recording vocals so I'd like to illustrate a little bit and this is a small capsule condenser mic it's an audio technica I don't know which model but I love this mic I use two of these frequently to record acoustical guitar fantastic microphone but if I were to use this vocal vocally to record a vocal I would place it if I want let's say a very breathy approach to the recording and I want to eliminate the acoustical support of the environment I would place it very very close like this and if you have a voice that for instance has a lot of plosive sounds like peep hops and are very sibling you may want to put a windscreen between and if it was a large capsule can answer Mike in other words like this I would have a position about like this and in varying degrees if you want to add acoustical support to the sound you could have the mic as far back as this let's say and with this position would add a lot of the early reflections that are occurring in this acoustical space to the sound but if you want to eliminate the acoustical support or let's say minimize the acoustical support you can have it as close as this and I frequently do that I think we should talk a little bit about synthesizers and the important role that they play in the manipulation of sounds to me synthesizers are an incredible device that create the components of music the problem with synthesizers though has always been to me the reality or the starkness of the direct sound is not very interesting and so what I do frequently with synthesizers is I will send the sound out into the studio or a room you don't really need a studio but a big room and then mic the room to get the early reflections and some acoustic support true acoustic support to the sound and then add back just a little bit of that microphone the acoustic support to the direct sound and it tremendously expands the quality of the synthesizer ok we're going to take the sound of the synthesizers for this recording which is what I call virtual in other words it's the direct output and I'm going to add the sound of this studio or this room to that now what I do is I take the sound and send it into the studio through these loudspeakers and then with the XY microphone technique or coincident pair I will add a portion of the sound of this room to the recording of the synthesizers so if you notice here I'm facing the microphones away from the sound I'm not trying to record the sound of the speakers I really don't want that what I want is the early reflections of the sound in their natural acoustical order so I will take this microphone this is XY or coincident pair and the object is to get the capsules at right angles whoops to each other and as close to each other as is physically possible like this and then a small portion of this room sound in stereo is added to the mix of the synthesizers ok first hears the sound of just the synthesizer in other words the virtual the direct output of the synthesizer [Music] [Music] now here's the sound of the synthesizer through the speakers in the room as heard by the microphones this is early reflections only [Music] [Music] [Music] and here's a combination of the two where we mix the sound of the microphones in with the virtual sound of the or the direct sound of the synthesizers and get a much wider more interesting sonic picture of the synthesizers [Music] [Music] now what normally happens is I have a ratio of about 80% direct sound and 20% room mics and what this does is it adds that ratio of early reflections to the sound of the synthesizer I love to think out a sound field that I'm working on and to plan it and try to combine different techniques and make them fit together and it's not as simple as you would think at first because I always like to have a little bit of reality of sound in the sound field so to speak a bit of blue patch of blue sky somewhere in my sonic canvas if it was a vocal background part I would use a stereophonic mic technique for instance and combined that with single point sources in other words of monophonic single microphone techniques so that as a result the the stereo pass will contain the early reflections in the sound field and it will contain them in their natural relationship in their natural order which makes the overall sound of that part of the music very very real and it gives it a width and a dimension that that using only mono point sources monophonic point sources it wouldn't be there in otherwise i do that with michael jackson's recording frequently when we're doing backgrounds like a song like rock with you for instance many of the background harmonies in that are recorded in stereo and it combined with the monophonic images makes a very rich and wide sound and it's very interesting to the ear I guess one of the best ways that I can illustrate how I use microphone technique is a two is to give you a specific example of a recording that I have done that I'm sure a lot of you heard and that's recording of the Andre Crouch choir on Michael Jackson's man in the mirror and to me this is a classic example of X Y or coincident pair microphone technique and what it is is two microphones placed as close together as we possibly can and the idea being that the arrival time of the sound hits both capsules at almost the same point in time now when we talk about XY technique frequently that there's an assumption made that in XY that we would use a cardioid mic but that's not really true and I think that's an assumption that we shouldn't make and what happens with using cardioid is that we end up with a highly directional microphone system and also with cardioid with the large capsule condenser mics we have a great deal of proximity effect so if your sound source is closer to one mic than the other even though they're their mics are very very close you will have a distortion of the stereo panorama but what I do is that you may find interesting is I used the mics in Omni and bi kind of rely on something that I've known there are almost no truly Omni microphones available to us there are a couple but they're highly esoteric and for instance even if you if you take a mic that indicates that it's Omni it will still have enough of a polar pattern to it so that used in XY that the microphones will present a really beautiful stereo spread what we're going to do is to bring a choir into the studio here and I'm going to demonstrate how this choir recording technique works with a pair of microphones in the middle of the studio like this the mics will be the capsules will be pointing this way in bi-directional you can actually do it in Omni as well since there are no truly Omni microphones there will be considerable stereo effect there will be more stereo width with bi-directional then the choir is placed around the studio like this and then at this width if the walls of the studio were like this if you move them in like this you would get less early reflections and more presence on the sound and if you mix the two if you did one pass at the back position like from here and then doubled the choir had them sing the exact parts again at this position and mix the two the result is incredible actually we'll do the whole thing we're setting it we're gonna record the choir with a XY stereo mic setup or coincident pair and this is the lower of the two said that up and this should the choir will be standing so this mic will be set right here and this mic will be moved back here and it is also to be set for bi-directional which is now yes and the idea with this microphone technique is to have the capsules as close together as possible physically to minimize the phase differences of the arrival time of the sound and the capsules are right angles to each other and as close to vertical as we can make them and the upper one can be dropped just here right there as close as we can get them without touching this is the setup for XY coincident pair both the capsules are set for bi-directional pattern and the mics are as close together as we can possibly get them this what this does is the arrival time of the sound that both capsules is as close in time as possible first what we're going to do is record some ooze with the choir and we'll record a stereo pass of them doing this on a pair of tracks on the multitrack [Music] there's two ways to approach this we can have them sing the harmonies at one time and adjust their distance from the microphones to make the harmony balance correct or musical or what I like to do is have the choir sing one note of the harmony and then record that on a pair of stereo tracks and then record the next note and so on so that I can adjust the harmony balance during the mix down process okay here's a take of one of the notes of the choir [Music] okay let's listen and check some of these tracks without the cue mix to listen to the stereo image here's another take of another note which is a harmony part with the choir [Music] Oh [Music] and here's another note of harmony and then when we mix this song I will be able to balance these parts in relationship to the melody [Music] [Music] [Music] what we'll do now is to record background lyrics with the choir on another pair of tracks on the multitrack tape okay here's what I'd like to do is we're gonna record a monophonic solo or lead part to use against this gorgeous stereo spread with the choir created by the XY image the mono part or solo part will I will use as a point source probably place it in the middle which will create a wonderful contrast to the stereo spread of the choir parts listen to how the mono point source tracks sound against the stereo images [Music] [Music] when recording electric guitar experiment a little bit with microphone placement you can get some very interesting results this way whether you're recording in stereo or mono here we're using a pair of Audio Technica 40-50 ones in a kind of modified a be setup with this microphone setup there will be quite a bit of left/right intensity [Music] [Music] initially everything that I record in my projects I record on analog tape first I love the sound of analog tape recording it has a beauty in a quality to it that I don't hear in digital recording and once you have that quality in the music and have it recorded that way then I will take this here's the to 24 track tape machines I will take these tapes and transfer them to digital and once you have the quality and the sound of the analog recording in the music it stays most of it stays there in digital and what digital does well digital recording it does dramatically well it's very robust it stays and you can play the tape next year it will sound the same as it did now that is not true with analog analog is more fragile it is it is not as robust as digital if you take a video camera and a motion picture camera let's say and you take a 35-millimeter beautiful high quality motion picture camera and right next to it you set up a video very high quality video camera and you photograph the same image and you look at the result of these two recording devices the motion picture film will be beautiful and have a quality to it that is very pleasing the video image will have all the same color temperatures and the same basic quality but it will have a harshness to it that that is not as pleasant as the motion picture film this is exactly the way it hits me the difference between analog and digital recording analog recording to me has a beauty and equality to it that is not present in digital recording this would be a great time to discuss one of the techniques that I use a lot I call it multitrack multiplexing and it was during the recording of the score for the motion picture The Wiz that I came up with the basic idea for this system and I still use it today it's a basic system of organizing multitrack tapes and then using those with pre mixing of individual tapes to obtain many many more stereophonic and even monophonic images in a recording so I think we have a tendency to think if we have a 16 track recording is a machine is that that's all the tracks that we can use and such is not definitely not the case I can actually have any number of these 8 track recording tapes and use them in a modular way there are several reasons why this system works the way it does first of all let's say I want to record the background vocals on a four-part harmony thing with 4 singers or some such thing I will what I'll do is to take the 4 singers do a stereo recording over dub them and maybe perhaps I'll want to do each set of tracks to be a different note in the four-part harmony so that I can then balance the harmony and make that balance the exact way that I want it to sound so what I can do is to do that you know let's say I record all four parts stereo passes on one tape I will then take these 8 tracks mix that down to 2 tracks of this tape and then it leaves me 6 more tracks or let's say those 6 tracks are rhythm instruments so I've still only used 8 tracks of this tape but this tape has all the original elements so if I don't like this balance if it doesn't work well for me with the basic rhythm instruments I can then do this over again make this balance any number of times that I want you to achieve the desired emotional effect the key to this system is don't ever erase a track I never erased tracks there is no way that you can pre judge the emotional value of a balance until you have here occurred all of the elements of the music in other words we can't have recorded the piano bass and drums of a Orchestra and then do the vocal backgrounds and expect to make a judgment a correct balanced judgment of the background vocal balance you have to make that judgment after you hear all the elements in place so if the vocal backgrounds are on this tape I don't erase any of those I can make a premix on this tape on two tracks and everything to work with but when I'm all done all the elements are in place I can then go back and change that premix and until it works with the proper emotional value in the myth in the music as far as putting depth in the recording goes I think probably one thing that helps there more than anything is the use of stereophonic microphone technique wherever possible in other words if you're recording acoustic guitar don't just stick a microphone in front of it and make a mono image of that put two microphones coincident pair and really work on the sound this is what makes left right and deep and depth in a in a music recording recording a choir recording a piano any instrument don't please don't be satisfied with a monophonic image work towards achieving true stereo perspective in Unum recording there are instances in music recording where I will go for a monofin recording for one very good reason let's say let's take lead vocal for instance the reason I would not use a stereo microphone technique there is that I want a point source image with no wandering wandering meaning that if it was a stereo mic a little bit of movement left or right would be perceived by the microphones and would be very confusing to the ear another thing I'd really like to get across there everyone is try to think of your recording as a piece of sonic reality and that does not necessarily mean that this sonic reality could occur in natural acoustics and I think probably the most important thing there is that our ear training should come from hearing live music in a good acoustical situation learn what an orchestra truly sounds like all music is conceived to be heard with acoustical support now that doesn't necessarily mean reverberation or echo what it means is acoustical support whether it be a small space and a large space or the combination of those two spaces in one recording to create an emotional effect I kind of think of my work as making sonic sculptures in other words pieces of music reality that couldn't necessarily occur in a natural acoustic environment but yet they have to make sense musically the emotional impact of the music has to be there we must make the music sound elegant and tasteful and appealing but more important perhaps than those points we have to make our music sound so good that people want to hear it over and over again if nothing else comes across in this tape to you the final user I would like to impart one piece of advice and that is to try to make our recordings sound more than merely multi-channel mono in other words try to think of stereo during the recording process during the concept of the music that we're we're working on to me I think that one facet of my technique probably has affected my sound more than any other and that is the fact that I use many many true stereophonic images in the creation of the recordings that I've done and by that I mean true stereo with two microphones and trying to capture capture the reality of a stereo sound field and using that as part of my sonic landscape so what I have said I guess is that try not to think in merely monophonic images and I think you'll be amazed at how this can change your whole approach to the record [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Ricardo Felix: Áudio, Música & Cinema

Views: 183,647

Keywords: vhs, bruce swedien, sound, audio, mix, mixing, recording, stereo

Id: GEXA9sOY9QU

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020