A few days ago, I attended an event hosted by the Recording Academy featuring Bob Power. With an original and captivating teaching style, he bestowed some unusual advice upon the audience. Some of the things he said were a complete opposite of the common wisdom in the recording industry.  Here’s two of my favorite nuggets:

1. Your microphone is not the most important thing in the vocal chain. The mic pre is. With a good mic pre, you can make any microphone sound good. The second most important component is the A/D converter. Pretty unusual opinion. Not sure if I agree with this one, but hey, intriguing food for thought coming from one of the greats. Bob followed this opinion up by sharing some cool tips on mic technique which assures a good vocal sound on cheap mics. He played us a track that he recorded with a 57, and it did sound really good.

2. The first two vocal takes are almost always unusable, so don’t have the vocalist do the difficult passages which might blow his/her chops in the first few takes. Wise advice, although it does contradict the million times I’ve heard people saying that the first take is often the best. Personally, I know of at least one artist who I record on a regular basis, whose first take is always magical, and subsequent takes usually end up being used for small patches of just a few phrases that may have been a miss in the otherwise amazing first take.  But for most singers, yeah, that’s good advice.

And here’s my favorite Power’s truism of the night:  The more expensive and fancy the studio is, the more problematic the HVAC system is.  So true!

Check out Bob’s cool site: bobpower.com

Happy New Year!  I’m back from a long holiday slumber. I figured I’d never blog again since the world was gonna end last month, but we’re still here, so I thought I’d write a quick wrap-up of my 2012 engineering experiences:

Last year was like a history lesson in great songwriting for me, having worked on two albums of music by Jerome Kern, and having just finished an album contrasting the works of Noel Coward and Cole Porter. I’m in heaven every time I work with Rebecca Luker, and this time was no different. Her new album “I Got Love” is one of the two albums featuring Kern’s music. The other was “The Land Where Good Songs Go“, with a fantastic lineup: Kate Baldwin, Heidi Blickstenstaff, Rebecca Luker, Philip Chaffin, Graham Rowat and Matthew Scott. I also just finished “Nole and Cole“, which features Sara Jean Ford, Elizabeth Stanley, Barbara Welsh, Philip Chaffin, Euan Morton,  and Matthew Scott. Coward and Porter’s music was arranged by David Loud.

I continued my work as a producer this year, with the release of ‘Without You” by Anthony Rapp.  Check out this album if you’re a fan of “Rent”.

I’m also glad to see some of my past work hit the market this year. Check out Jerry Douglas’ “Traveler“, and Bruce Levingston’s “Still Sound“.

And lastly, I’m very happy to have worked on two of this year’s Grammy nominated cast album recordings. Both “Follies” and “Porgy And Bess” got the Grammy nod in the Best Musical Theater Album category!

I”m looking forward to seeing what 2013 will bring.  Keep ya posted!

Working with MIDI in Pro Tools, there’s one thing that’s always bothered me. Well, no. There’s several things that bother me about working with MIDI in Pro Tools, but for once, I’ve been able to address one of them. Have you ever found that when editing a MIDI track that includes lots of sustain pedal data, you start to pull your hair out after a few minutes? I have. I just don’t like messing around with sustain data, and I always wished that there was a way to consolidate this data into midi on/off data. In other words, when I record a pass of MIDI, instead of having separate midi on/off data and sustain data, I wish to just have my midi off messages recorded when the sustain pedal is released, without CC64 messages being recorded at all. Well, lately I’ve been messing around with Max/MSP, which is a visual programming language designed especially for MIDI/audio applications, and after getting a hang of it, I figured I’d put my new skills to the test and finally create a way to make this happen. Read More

OK. I just gotta get this off my chest. Most of the time, I use de-essers totally the wrong way. I know, it’s terrible! If you have any experience with Audio Engineering, then you probably know that you should put the de-esser first in the effect chain, so that when you adjust the eq and compression, it doesn’t mess up your de-essing threshold. And you probably use the de-esser in Split mode (sometimes called “HF only”) for maximum transparency, so that only the high frequency content is turned down when the de-esser does its job. After all, that’s what everyone does. I’ve seen countless engineers at work, and I don’t remember one of them breaking these rules. Well, I break them on just about every pop and rock mix I do. Here’s why: Read More

So I finished the “Merrily We Roll Along” record a few days ago. I really like recording Broadway cast albums, especially Stephen Sondheim’s stuff. They’re always big, involved, and each one presents its own set of challenges. This production had 20+ people in the cast, a fairly large orchestra, and a huge amount of music to be recorded. Yes, this was another double album. There’s one thing I wanted to talk about that was a bit unusual this time around. The instrumentation on this album was somewhat different than your usual cast album, and I got to experiment with a few different mixing techniques necessitated by this unusual arrangement. Read More

The cast album recording of Porgy And Bess hits the stores today, so I figured I’d put together a few words about the process of recording, editing, and mixing it. This is a powerhouse of a show starring Audra McDonald, Norm Lewis, and David Alan Grier. With some surprises encountered in the process, the album was made in an unusual way (at least for me) both while tracking, and in the editing and mixing stages. Read More

I recently finished working on an album called Sweet Little Devil. This is one of George Gershwin’s earlier musicals, and it is his earliest surviving score. The album is being released by PS Classics, working in partnership with the Library of Congress to bring us this rare gem as a part of their Forgotten Musicals series. Read More

With the recent passing of Dynamic Range Day ’12, I’ve seen many articles making their plea to the music industry to stop the loudness wars. They say that in an effort to outdo each other, the powers that be are putting pressure on mastering engineers to make albums louder and louder. This, they claim, is making albums sound progressively worse and worse. The articles claim that we’ve been abusing technology, and that today’s albums don’t sound as good as the albums of old. I have a couple of bones to pick with this argument, so let me wax philosophical for a minute… Read More