For those of you who have recorded a professional solo cd,album,track or what ever you want to call it these days, could you please explain the process that you went through in the studio from start to finish.

Example; Did you try to record everything in one take, or did you do it chunk by chunk? How did you choose the studio? Did you record the solo trombone apart from the accompanying Ensemble etc

Cheers and happy holidays

Sam

I've done a few chamber ensemble recordings as an audio engineer, including solo projects for others. So I can give you some perspective with how the project could get put together. But a critical piece of info is what kind of album you are doing -- is it classical or is it commercial? This will dictate where you record, what you record with, and how you put it together.

I would use a controlled studio for a jazz album, but I would only choose a studio environment for a classical recording if I literally had no alternative. A small hall or medium recital hall would be much better for that kind of recording.

[quote="SamBTbrn"]For those of you who have recorded a professional solo cd,album,track or what ever you want to call it these days, could you please explain the process that you went through in the studio from start to finish.

Example; Did you try to record everything in one take, or did you do it chunk by chunk? How did you choose the studio? Did you record the solo trombone apart from the accompanying Ensemble etc

Cheers and happy holidays

Sam[/quote]

For my album:

One take: depends. Most pieces I did a few entire takes of each piece, and then some patching takes to cover anything that needed it. For the longest and/or choppiest tracks we went straight away to taping by section. When you're recording solo music for 6+ hours in the day, you need to be strategic. Don't be a hero. Nobody will give you a medal for having one take and no cuts. Just take the avenue that leads to the best result.

Choice of space: in my case, with sackbut, organ and harpsichord, it obviously was going to be a church. We went for a small church in my hometown, which was very convenient for commuting, especially in January with 2 feet of snow on the ground. I had never played there, but my engineer (who's also a brass player) went to check it out and thought it should work fine. It turned out to be ok but not be the best choice. Nice sound but a bit too small and looooots of reflections (we couldn't use any of the room mics because they caught too much direct early reflections off the side walls) and some weird interactions between my sound and the acoustic that really limited the angle and position I could set myself up in. Ideally choose a space where you know you can sound at your best and where you know in advance what the challenges will be.

Recording the trombone separately: for classical, definitely not. For other genres, could be good. There are advantages to recording together. For one thing, it's more interesting musically and you can feed off each other's ideas better. But there's also disadvantages. Sometimes you get weird interactions between the sounds of different instruments in the different mics. If everything is recorded separately, you avoid that and you can isolate everything. And you can then also use different takes simultaneously (say you do something you really like on a take but someone else makes a mistake at exactly that moment and you can't use it if everyone is heard in every mic).

I'm a big believer in having a producer who's separate from the engineer and who only has to think about listening, mark down mistakes or problems, and guide you, and doesn't have to also think about setting up, mic placement, getting the sound right, operating the workstation, etc. I have had some bad experiences when it's own person doing both jobs. Good producers don't abound. The best ones hear everything and mark down everything and are able to leave you with almost a fully ready edit plan. When you can't have a great one, then I recommend asking someone you really trust musically and who knows your playing and musicianship inside out and knows what you'll be happy with or not. There's nothing as frustrating as being told "yeah that sounds good" and then getting to post prod and seeing that there's not one take that you feel is up to the standard you have in your head because the producer doesn't know what you could sound like, or what you find good. Tin Cugelj produced my album, and he was really good at directing us because he knows exactly what I like, how I want to sound. For my Viadana album Christophe Gauthier produced, who's been my closest musical collaborator for 15 years, and who played the programme on your with us right before the recordings, and therefore knew the music and our interpretation of it in great details. It really helped.

Play for the mics, not for the space like you would if an audience was there. In my experience a spot mic placed off-axis pointing to your bell rim from a few feet above and/or to the side usually gives the best results, allowing you to increase your clarity without changing your tone quality the way a mic placed in front of the bell tends to.

To add onto what Maximilien is saying, assuming you are going the classical route:

A classical solo album would have a producer and an audio engineer (could be the same person but having both is better). The producer would ideally have access to the scores, and you would plan in advance where the breaks or chunks would be and mark that into the scores. There are tricks you can do to hide these breaks. The breaks do not necessarily mean that you stop playing and stop the recording there, but they are places where you can stitch two different takes together with a crossfade. You can also strategically plan to stop at these breaks before recording more if a simple crossfade won't work or the piece is really difficult.

There is something to be said for doing two or three complete takes of pieces that you've mastered and especially memorized. If you are able to keep tempos relatively similar between your various complete takes, you can stitch the best bits of each take together using crossfades and have a recording of the best performance you've (n)ever done. This will take less time overall for everyone involved. You would think, oh, well any pro should just be able to do that for every piece on their album! But like Maximilien was saying, nobody is a machine, and making a recording is fundamentally different from a live performance. A live performance is watching Bob Ross paint mountains. A recording *is* the painting after it is framed -- it should be close to perfect, and nobody gets to see how it was painted.

If there is a sustained note for all performers longer than a second or so, it is pretty easy to do a crossfade on these areas and no one will notice. You use this technique to stitch large chunks or even two complete performances together. Other places where this can work are loud attacks that interrupt the ambient reverb (reverb makes these crossfades trickier to do because it will typically be spilling into notes at different times on different takes).

Another technique you can do is at places where the trombone phrase ends on a long note and the accompaniment continues on through rapidly under that note. In this case you would plan to completely stop recording at the end of the long note. The accompaniment will be directed to cut out as soon as you hit the held note that ends the phrase, so that it will just be you alone. Once you are happy with that phrase, you can record from where that note starts and continue on, but this time only the accompaniment will play at the start (where you were just ending your phrase) and you will just come in on the next entrance. You can stack the first takes (including all of the reverb tail from your long note) over the take with only the accompaniment at the beginning, and now you've effectively covered up your strategic break.

You definitely want to avoid overreaching. There have been albums made of famous pros who are splicing in and out every few bars. The listener can't tell, because the engineer was really good, but doing something like that takes a lot of recording time and costs a lot. Lots of famous soloists have albums with pieces they've never performed live (or the live version is significantly less technical than the album) -- they probably were going bar by bar in the recording.

Choosing a good hall to record in gives you a lot of positives. First, it will sound real. Second, you will have room to move your mics around to get the best sound. A studio setup will often leave you little voice but to put the mic too close to and possibly in front of your bell. This setup is *not* what a trombone sounds like to someone in the audience. In a hall, you can place a spot pair up above and out in front of the bell, off axis. You can also place your main pair for the main stereo image and it won't sound "dry". You can even try your luck with room mics to capture the reverb of the hall. A very common technique is to use the main pair for the overall sound, add a touch of the spot mics, and just enough of the room mics to give a sense of space. A mid length digital reverb (a professional impulse one, not a free plugin) would be used to bridge the direct sound with the long reverb tail of the room mics (and ironically most of the reverb's sound will actually be this fake reverb). Decca has been using this fake reverb bridging technique for quite a while now and it sounds really good.

A studio doesn't give you any of that unless it's like Abbey Road or some humongous studio.

[quote="harrisonreed"]

If there is a sustained note for all performers longer than a second or so, it is pretty easy to do a crossfade on these areas and no one will notice. You use this technique to stitch large chunks or even two complete performances together. Other places where this can work are loud attacks that interrupt the ambient reverb (reverb makes these crossfades trickier to do because it will typically be spilling into notes at different times on different takes).
[/quote]

Most engineers typically do cuts right at the moment of a note change. Cutting on a long note very occasionally works, but most of the time it's problematic. It requires a much longer crossfade, and everything has to be identical in both takes for it to work: intonation, balance, voicing of chords, dynamic, shape of the note, resonance of whatever came before, etc. And even when all of that matches you might still run into problems with phase. Ideally you want a place where nobody is holding over and everyone is moving or rearticulating. Sometimes if only part of the group has something but it's strong enough, it'll hide the cut breaking up a held note in someone else's part, and still work.

Yes, you definitely need a longer crossfade for chords. Sometimes that is the only place that will work.

Yes, big tutti attacks that cut through the ambient reverb are a great spot to do it.

I was just trying to give the two methods I know (besides the most obvious, dead space in the piece) to edit together takes from full run throughs. We still don't know if the album the OP wants to do will be jazz -- then it's completely different! <EMOJI seq="1f602" tseq="1f602">😂</EMOJI>

Thanks Max and Harrison.

It would be a combination of modern music (including jazz/funk work) and classical music.

So both methods are handy to know.

The clean sound you expect on a jazz album will need much closer mics, set to a different pattern, with instruments recorded in mono and then panned by the engineer. The engineer will do it for you and will know what to do, but basically for classical you are going to use omnis or "directional" omnis (think Decca tree, which uses mic capsules that are mounted in special spheres (Neumann M50) that makes them 'almost' omnis), maybe using cardioid on the spots, and for the jazz stuff you would probably want a close cardioid or maybe a ribbon (which is figure of 8). Technically you could close mic the jazz tunes in the same hall and get that studio sound, but it will just be harder to control bleed and you will need to mic very closely and have a lot of discipline about not moving around too much. Going the opposite way, there is nothing quite as lame as a classical album that is over-produced and sounds like it was multi-tracked in a studio.

The advantage of close mics in the studio is that you can multitrack everything, use a click track, go measure by measure, or part by part. You can record a fake video after the fact with the click track to show what it would have looked like if studios recorded one-takes. You can pack up and come back on a different day and pick up where you left off. You can't do that so easily in an environment that is less controlled (Where were the mics in relation to the stage and hall again... Where was I standing...?) Close mics on a source also lend themselves much nicer to EQ and effects than trying to use that stuff on a stereo source with reverb baked in already.

Good luck with your project!! I want to hear what you end up doing!!

My advice would be get an engineer who is used to recording both styles, and can tell you what his ideas are on how to deal with this is. As Harrison says, they typically involve different approaches to mic types and placement, different acoustics, and really just a different approach and process. But for an album, you normally want a unified sound, and that kind of requires a single venue and as close as possible to the same set-up, so that when you listen to two tracks from the album you don't feel like they're from two completely separate albums. Anything that can stay constant should. If there's a piano in everything, probably a good idea to leave it in the same physical location and with the exact same mics, for example. That might mean having it in a different position than you normally would for a "recital" sound for the classical stuff. Even if you change horns and obviously sound different, anything you can do to keep the same sound identity in terms of how you're being recorded will also help, as that's the main constant and your album.

We struggled on my album with this because of the way we were set up. We had three different instrumentations (trombone and harpsichord, trombone and organ, and trombone and both keyboards), and in one of them I ended up sounding very different than in the other two because I had to be angled differently to avoid having both instruments on the same side of the stereo image. We spent a lot of time in post prod trying to get them to match, and you can still hear it a bit on the finished album. And that was using the same mic set up in the same space, just me angled differently in the space.

Now that's all the engineer's job, but it's good for you to already think of the potential problems and to develop a clear idea of the sound you want, where you're willing to compromise or not, etc.

[quote="SamBTbrn"]For those of you who have recorded a professional solo cd,album,track or what ever you want to call it these days, could you please explain the process that you went through in the studio from start to finish.

Example; Did you try to record everything in one take, or did you do it chunk by chunk? How did you choose the studio? Did you record the solo trombone apart from the accompanying Ensemble etc

Cheers and happy holidays

Sam[/quote]

The album I released this year was an "accidental" album. It didn't start out as an album/CD, just a fun project with friends. So keep that in mind when I talk about process. And this was a jazz album. I would have done it completely differently if it had been a classical project. If you're curious you can hear it here:

<YOUTUBE list="OLAK5uy_kKFEg6Id5U8KeHepX61F47LCh5m2WpbKg"><LINK_TEXT text="https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5 ... RNjBEyn-as">https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kKFEg6Id5U8KeHepX61F47LCh5m2WpbKg&si=lE0i41RNjBEyn-as</LINK_TEXT></YOUTUBE>

The only tune we did in one take was "Body and Soul," and that was because we were running out of time. So we talked the roadmap through and just played it once, without rehearsal. Thankfully, it came out great. For all the rest we did one rehearsal (which we recorded but never used) and two takes. I then chose the best of the two takes (with "best" being defined primarily on how I did). However, on one tune ("La Zorra") I had a terrible percussionist who got lost in his solo, so I had to grab his solo from the first take and plug it into the second take (which was overall my better take). Thankfully, I was using a click track, so we were able to just swap the first (decent) percussion take onto the second (disaster) take.

I chose the studio by finding the one with the best space, best mic collection, and most isolation booths because I wanted to keep sounds separate. In my area, there turned out to be only one studio that met all the requirements and was big enough for a big band (which we ended up not recording anyway).

On most tunes I recorded the trombone part straight through during our takes. On other tunes I multi-tracked multiple trombone parts, so it was a process of playing one part after another and layering them all together at the end.

For all but one of the tracks I was in an isolation booth, and all other instruments were as isolated as possible. I put the drums in their own room. Electric instruments (piano, guitar, bass) in another, going straight to the board rather than through amps, so they remained isolated. Strings were together in one room. Woodwinds were together in another room.

I used click tracks on everything that had a single tempo, and the musicians could mute the click track if they wanted to. One reason I used a click track was because I sometimes recorded strings and woodwinds after the basic tracks were laid down, and I wanted complete control of the later-added parts. (I have since learned I didn't have to do that, but at the time I didn't know.) On one track ("Oblivion") it was supposed to be just me and an acoustic guitar, and we were planning to record in the same room with no separation. But the guitar player flaked at the last second, so I panicked and recorded a different version that was just me, piano, and cello. Because it was set up for me and the guitar, we just played in the same room, and fairly close to each other. I can't hear the difference between that tune and the ones where we were all separated.

For my next project (set to record in February) I'm going to have a dedicated conductor and a dedicated producer that I trust. With me trying to do everything, I felt pulled in too many directions, and I couldn't concentrate on just playing my best.

In post-production, the engineer did rough mixes on his own, and then we got together and tore them apart and mixed them the way I wanted them. For mastering, the engineer did it all. But I didn't like what he did at first, so he did them again to my preferences. If I had been present, he would have only had to do it once.

I think it turned out pretty well that way. And I could schedule people a little easier, since I didn't always have enough room for all the musicians at once, and we had scheduling issues because I hired very busy musicians. Glad I did it that way. I got the people I wanted.

Such a clear description, Dana, thanks!