Vintage Gear/Sound Purity
Jeff Liberatore
I realize we were only as good as technology and parts would allow, but were
these designers of vintage mic's and channel strips etc... worried about
purity of the original sound source?
When I listen to "Kind of Blue" I hear what I would call a record that was
trying to show brilliance as it was happening in a great room...In the mix
is where I hear the live room reverb sends being sent to the opposite side a
of given instruments' unaffected sound...But that's still fairly
accurate...I guess what I'm asking; are these recordings revered for the
naturalness of the recordings or the gear that helped produced the sound or
the mix or all the above? Now that this gear is desireable, we tend to say
those tube mic's will have a tendancy to color the sound...So are we using
them because they color the sound which may not have been their original
intent or what?
When I listen to old Motown recordings I hear mics/preamps etc...distorting
in what would be a "colored" way and it sounds cool but probably not what
the original engineer intended...I would guess they were going for the best
performance and what we now revere as charm and warmth are really just happy
accidents that weren't "cool" until someone said that distortion is cool, I
gotta have that and then the vintage gear craze...
Don't get me wrong, I love those sounds, but are we replicating sounds that
were originally that were originally regarded as mistakes? Does it all
really matter in the scheme of things?
But where does purity of the original source material play in this whole
thing? In classical music only?
Just curious on your thoughts...
--
Jeff
http://www.onlinerock.com/musicians/jl130
JnyVee.
>
> When did purity of the original sound source become important in recording?
in the 20's... no, I take that back: with Edison!
> I realize we were only as good as technology and parts would allow, but were
> these designers of vintage mic's and channel strips etc... worried about
> purity of the original sound source?
absoluitely. It's only in teh last 15 years, with the advent of Cheap
Hobby Recordgin Gear that quality has gone down the dumper in favor of
AFFORDABILITY BY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, that thing shave gotten shitty
adn the BULK of the people playing Recording Star have NO idea what a
real recording chain sounds like... mainly because it still costs teh
prics of a small house instead of a small car. TANSTAAFL
> ....I guess what I'm asking; are these recordings revered for the
> naturalness of the recordings or the gear that helped produced the sound or
> the mix or all the above?
I know of NOBODY who bought a music record just because of the mics or
gear used to produce it. they ARE bought because of a great performance
and/or a great sound, be it natural or otherwise striking.
> Now that this gear is desireable, we tend to say
> those tube mic's will have a tendancy to color the sound...
'tube mics' don;t color the sound any more than equally well-designed
solid state mics on teh same capsule do... unless they;re broke or being
abused. Teh capsule is more a determining factor than the electronics AT
THE SAME LEVEL OF DESIGN AND BUILD.
> So are we using
> them because they color the sound which may not have been their original
> intent or what?
absolutely.. (adn with large diphragm mics color is ALL of what they;re
about)... you can use ANY electromechanical device to achieve colored
and specific characters of sound... it;s teh ARTIST who decides whether
the recording goal is HONESTY or ENHANCEMENT and you choose and use the
tools accordingly.
>
> When I listen to old Motown recordings I hear mics/preamps etc...distorting
> in what would be a "colored" way and it sounds cool but probably not what
> the original engineer intended...I would guess they were going for the best
> performance and what we now revere as charm and warmth are really just happy
> accidents that weren't "cool" until someone said that distortion is cool, I
> gotta have that and then the vintage gear craze...
Motown and other period stuff was VERY well produced on the whole (from
songwriting through arranging, musicians rehearsals and session) and
distortion in general was NOT the intent... they were blemishes that
were left since there was no economical way to better the take.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I love those sounds, but are we replicating sounds that
> were originally that were originally regarded as mistakes?
in many cases absolutely.. but as to WHY... that;'s a better bigger
question. Distortion means abuse and that translates to us as someone
'pushing the envelope' beyond what was intended and that translates
emotionally as Hi Energy... (the classic movie soundtrack gunshot was
HUGELY distorted both at the mic and on teh tape, and we LOVED it...
sounded like your ears blew up... only recently has this gotten turned
around... best example is the killer firearms work in HEAT) and just
like blowing 10kw of 9-lights at the audience to make them think they;re
haveing a hell of a time at a concert (no matter that the performer is
lame), so too adding distortion and huge compression (making the
recording sound 'over the top'... and making the room sound like it's
being hammered too hard) is a way that we percieve 'hi energy
performance' through eletronic abuse, and get the IMPRESSION that we're
hearing Somethign Amazing when in reality all we';re hearing, on teh
whole is a mediocre artist trying to fake the sound of 'Pushing Things
Farther'.
.. it's a fake.
It;s a SHAME
but it's what everybody;s trying to fart with. LOUDER means BIGGER
means BETTER cuz it's Pushin The Edge Man!..
when in reality it's just Sounding Bad.
Most recording work, best or worst, is painting with sound and there's
NOTHING honest about it at all.. like an impressionist painting vs
photo-realism. It;'s a STYLE. You can do it a little or a lot. You
choose.
Boston Symphony
vs London Symphony on a movie score
vs Lyle Lovett
vs KD Lang
vs SRV
vs Propellorheads
vs Radiohead
vs Limp Bizquick...
painter's tools and techniques.
>Does it all
> really matter in the scheme of things?
SURE it does... how an artist uses tools is ALL there is. It;s their
only way of getting their concepts across to the rest of us.
> But where does purity of the original source material play in this whole
> thing?
ANYWHERE you choose it to.
> In classical music only?
absolutely not! any artist that has a sound that gets you if you sit
across from them at a bus stop when they perform benefits from
honesty... early Tom Waits comes to mind... adn later Tom Waits went
thru the roof with mind-numbing use of EVERYTHING we've talked about
here.
>
justin
>adn the BULK of the people playing Recording Star have NO idea what a
>real recording chain sounds like...
well said. i admit, i was in that boat for all four years of high school but
after every recording i would think, "i know this is just for fun..i know this
is not professional". and now here i am with a home studio and in college for
recording.
-justin
JnyVee.
> >... things have gotten shitty
> >and the BULK of the people playing Recording Star have NO idea what a
> >real recording chain sounds like...
> justin wrote:
> well said. i admit, i was in that boat for all four years of high school
but that's what HS is -for-!
but
> after every recording i would think, "i know this is just for fun..i know this
> is not professional". and now here i am with a home studio and in college for
> recording.
so what's your $$ second Major track...?
j...@freedom.net
professional recordings of Jazz and Classical took a major dive down the
dumper just before or about 1970. While it's true most people don't notice
this a few certainly do. The reason original pressings of some of the great
Jazz and Classical albums made in the fifties and sixties cost a hundred
bucks is because the people who made them were working their hardest to
produce the most high fidelity product they could with the best tools that
were available to them and that a couple of people still notice enough to
drop $50-$100 on an old record. Amazingly many of these tools hold up
pretty well against what is made today and the sound quality on some of
these old recordings is seldom matched . That someone today in the
recording industry or even just interested in it has to ask "these designers
of vintage mic's and channel strips etc... worried about purity of the
forget the past.
JM
"JnyVee." <moc....@ybmurbrevlis.com> wrote in message
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musit...@my-deja.com
came out of pure, yea, had rock on my mind but the people I was
connected with had pure on their minds. Flat responses, square wave
reproducability, signal to noise, i/m distortion etc. I suppose that,
all depends on what it is. If it is a pipe organ, well what color do
you want to add to that. The pure sound is wonderful, every attempt to
prevent distortion (now I am calling distortion any thing that audibly
changes the original sound, which can be the monitors, and the
listening room as well), should be employed. But, today you would sort
of have to specialize in this kind of recording. Direct signal paths
etc. The folks that inpired me, had high end stuff for the time. A
midfield monitor today, was called a bookshelf speaker then. Roberts,
Ampex, Crown, Macintosh, revox, all come to mind. Specifications were
everything. The recordings were very pure, little if any eq,
compression. Mic placement, critical. Dynamic balance critical. But, it
wasn't top 40 music either. Jazz, classical, acoustic, natural. Most of
todays equipment, not talking rs, meets or exceeds those expectations.
Left up to the user, the type of music, and desired sound required.
I wonder what would be required in a reproduction system, to accuratly
reproduce true fidelity, and dynamic range, ultimately available on CD
for special purposes? The whole 95 db's, wouldn't that be great?
Stay Pure, Musi
In article <N4256.7532$0s3.5...@typhoon.columbus.rr.com>,
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
Bob Olhsson
Liberatore <jlib...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>Don't get me wrong, I love those sounds, but are we replicating sounds that
>were originally that were originally regarded as mistakes?
Very frequently. We are also almost never replicating what was really
happening, just some fantasy that it was the tubes, the compression or
the tape saturation as opposed to the entire studio and exactly what
people were trying to accomplish.
In my opinion a lot of it was preamps that clipped around +40 and the
leakage between the mikes from recording everybody playing at once.
In other words, the difference was often what was being painted and how
quickly it was accomplished rather than what kind of brushes were being
used.
--
Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery Recording Project Design and Consulting
Box 555, Novato CA 94948 Tracking, Mixing and Mastering
415.457.2620 FAX 415.456.1496 Mix Evaluation and Quality Control
38 years of making people sound better than they thought possible!
Chris Johnson
> You give me the impression, that you prefer pure. My background
> came out of pure, yea, had rock on my mind but the people I was
> connected with had pure on their minds. Flat responses, square wave
> reproducability, signal to noise, i/m distortion etc. I suppose that,
> all depends on what it is. If it is a pipe organ, well what color do
> you want to add to that. The pure sound is wonderful, every attempt to
> prevent distortion (now I am calling distortion any thing that audibly
> changes the original sound, which can be the monitors, and the
> listening room as well), should be employed. But, today you would sort
> of have to specialize in this kind of recording. Direct signal paths
> etc.
It's a funny thing- I myself prefer 'pure', to the extent that I have a
mixing board with three-band EQ and over 100 upgraded caps in it which
sits idle since I made a passive resistance mixer to mix my (20 bit thank
God) ADAT- which also has been upgraded rather a lot on the audio board.
And that's fine, and it does give me a recognizable 'house sound' (see
my besonic website at http://www.besonic.com/chrisj for examples,
especially the Wounded Skies album) but the funny thing is it cuts me off
from entire schools of music and production people use today. I'm not
quite sure what to make of that, except that there are 1,000,000 people
doing 'heavily effected electronic DAW production' and not so many doing
what I do. So I'll stick with it, but am aware of the trade-offs.
For instance: the most recent album 'Marginal Theorems' (I've mentioned
the custom Lexi reverb used on this) fits nicely into an ambient category,
and the electronic people can grok that. The previous album, 'Wounded
Skies', totally misses the mark for a lot of electronic people, because it
too obviously tries to be realistic. I've had people criticise the drums
_because_ they sound too much like a human drummer, I've recognised that
my tendency to impose a single recognisable recording space (or at least
tone colors) and stick with them is 'not hip' in the current day. This is
sort of halfway between a decision and a limitation: when I do what _I_
like, the reaction I get is 'very Haight-Ashbury', which is a compliment
and limitation. The idea is, the person saying this does not understand
what the sound and 'feel' of 'pure' studio gear is like- they associate
the sound with 'old stuff' they have heard, which actually will sound
FANTASTIC on high end gear, but in associating it, they are also making a
judgement of 'old and low fi sounding' compared to the tizzy bright grainy
stuff you get these days. (The particular track said to sound like 'Haight
Ashbury' was 'Supermarine Spitfire': well it ought, since it used an
extremely resonant bass tone, a low-gain P90 pickup rhythm tone and a
Strat-pickup lead through a combined delay/pitch shift effect on the
Lexicon that was specifically a nod to Hendrix)
The deal is, a lot of tones have a lot of warmth and body to them. The
60s sound was all warmth and body (at its best) but very little UberFocus-
borderline albums such as Tull's "Thick As A Brick" were to some extent
both and sounded fantastic- and the 80s-00s were all UberFocus and no
warmth. Things are swinging back now, to some extent, but that level of
focus and detail will not go out of style- it'll be a matter of trying to
get both warmth and clarity and balancing them, and very likely the
kaleidoscopic shifts and lack of a sense of invariant recording space will
become a permanent part of the engineer vocabulary. (I know I am feeling
the need to be able to add that when desired- laying plans to get
adat/edit so I can get at least somewhat nonlinear and still have the nice
tape backups)
I dunno. I think pure is a _great_ sound, done properly. That often
means no EQs, no extra stuff in the way, etc. It's the opposite of "oh,
60s, we'll get an old tape machine and bounce the tracks 600 times" that
I've so often seen. I'm even working on some gear (guitar preamps, etc)
that uses the Pure concept- rather than adding loads of coloration to
produce an 'amp tone', it will be more like letting through only as much
of the guitar sound as would be proper for the amp's coloration- sort of
'the Anti-POD' in its way. It remains to be seen how good this will sound
to the rest of the engineering world. Maybe I'm a relic *g* still, what's
not to like? The very concept 'the Anti-POD' is like a thrown gauntlet. :)
Chris Johnson
Jeff Liberatore
Bob Olhsson <o...@hyperback.com> wrote:
> In article <N4256.7532$0s3.5...@typhoon.columbus.rr.com>, Jeff
> Liberatore <jlib...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >Don't get me wrong, I love those sounds, but are we replicating
sounds that
> >were originally that were originally regarded as mistakes?
>
> Very frequently. We are also almost never replicating what was really
> happening, just some fantasy that it was the tubes, the compression or
> the tape saturation as opposed to the entire studio and exactly what
> people were trying to accomplish.
>
> In my opinion a lot of it was preamps that clipped around +40 and the
> leakage between the mikes from recording everybody playing at once.
>
> In other words, the difference was often what was being painted and
how
> quickly it was accomplished rather than what kind of brushes were
being
> used.
That's what I wanted to hear, and not to diss any other posters, your
response was the one I was looking for and was wondering if you would
reply...Thank you for clarifying what I believed to be true...