Jazz, folk and classical recordings are generally documents of a performance
I see what you mean, but that depends on what you take as a 'documents of a performance'
Yeah, bit of a vague phrase I agree. The second half of that sentence is probably more precise:
the engineers goal is to capture what is happening the studio as accurately as possible.
With pop, rock and dance music, the finished piece is a predetermined masterplan, and all the performances recorded in the studio are tailored to fit into that. Whereas with classical, folk and jazz, the finished piece is what happens when the musicians play - all the engineer does is to get it down into some permanent form. There will always be exceptions on both sides but I think as a general rule that's valid.
the vast majority of classical recordings are spliced together from many takes...
Are you sure about that? The thing about classical music is that the musicians playing it have been chosen purely on the basis of skill, so they should really be capable of playing a piece correctly 1st time. Obviously mistakes do get made, but if it takes more than 3 takes to get a result then something's wrong. Plus there's a serious financial incentive to keep the number of takes low - if you're recording a large-ish orchestra on MU rates, in a studio big enough to hold them, each take will be costing you a couple of grand, maybe more.
I don't know much personally about classical music, but I've got a friend who records orchestral soundtracks for big films - he did the lord of the rings trilogy, and he's doing the new Harry Potter film now. So this is distilled from conversations I've had with him. I know that his philosophy is to get the setup perfect and then get the result in the bag first time, or maybe second time if the musicians need a loosener to get comfortable. I'm sure he has spliced takes together in his time, but only in dire emergencies. That's certainly not how it's supposed to be done.
I suppose I'm talking about the most commercial end of orchestral recording - recording sessions for more specialist art-music pieces might be run differently.
I kind of hate to bring him up (cos it seems to derail threads with bitching about the guy) but Steve Albini's Electric Audio studio at the very least does initial recordings live in a room.
It worth making the point here that mutlitracking and overdubbing are not mutually dependent concepts. For example, if you're recording guitar, you can split the feed to three different amps and put one in a cupboard, one in a ballroom and one in an echo chamber. Then you record each amp to a seperate track, to give yourself more control over the guitar tone at mixdown. That's a multitrack technique, but it's not overdubbing because all the parts go down from the same performance. Engineers like Albini will use techniques like that all the time.
Albini is a great example of how real-time recording doesn't preclude the use of the studio as instrument - the distortion tones he uses are all about experimenting with mic placement and creative abuse of his equipment.
Even when recording a band live you can still record the input of every mic to its own track if you so desire. Others have pointed out some of the limitations of this, but it is possible.
Very difficult with jazz though, for the reasons I outlined in my earlier post. With rock it's common to move the amps out into different rooms to isolate them, so that you can record the band in real time but get completely discrete channels for each instrument. It's also relatively easy to isolate the instruments in classical music because the players are taking thier cues from the score and the conductor, not from each other.
one name: Teo Macero, worked as a Jazz studio producer thru the 60's then the 70's ...........
Cheers for the heads up, people. There's an extensive interview with Teo Macero that's linked from his wikipedia page - he's an interesting guy!
Re the phantom jazz/reggae crossover: it's frustrating, because the guys playing on those old reggae sides were obviously very accomplished players (didn't they all get taught by musical nuns or something? I read about that somewhere). You get flashes of instrumental brilliance every now and again, like that version of 'House Of New Orleans' that's on Kieth Hudson's
Pick A Dub. It just needed a Miles Davis figure to pull it into a movement in it's own right. But it never got one
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