recording challenges

[cellio]

I recently picked up a self-published solo CD from a dulcimer player I met. I have (ahem) some idea of how difficult it is to record a solo hammer-dulcimer album, which is why I've never done it. I mean, conventional wisdom is that if you're a band you'll spend an hour in the studio for each minute of final product; while in many cases being a soloist probably gets you a better ratio, I think it's probably at least that same ratio if you're a dulcimer player. There is so much that can go wrong.

This recording is credible; the playing is competent and the arrangements are generally good. (I think the CD is a couple years old; his live playing was pretty impressive.) One thing I noticed on the CD, though, is that there's one particular ornament that I think is very much over-used. That got me thinking about how that could happen.

The rest of this is not a criticism of the CD. It's just a ramble inspired by that recording and then veering off on its own.

It's possible to over-use an ornament withiin a single piece, but pieces go by pretty quickly when you're playing folk music so that won't stick with people for too long. If you use it on many pieces but you're used to playing background music, people might not notice. If you play focused music (concerts, not background) but don't play for an hour or more at a time, you might not reach the necessary threshold. And if you practice a fair bit -- like you probably do when preparing to go into the studio -- then you'll be hearing so much of everything you do that your perspective will be completely skewed. You may say "gee, I'm using that technique a lot", but then you'll say "well duh, I'm practicing for hours and hours, playing the same few pieces many times; of course I'm hearing that a lot". And then you'll probably dismiss it and go on.

The other thing is that recordings are different from live performances. Really different. Everything you do is there for posterity. You have no interaction with the listener, and no patter to break things up (unless you record that too). And a CD in the player may loop. The listener gets a more concentrated dose of your music than he would otherwise. Similarities between tracks magnify. And your senses were already dulled going in because of all that practice. And you probably did the final mix-down soon after the raw recording, because you were eager to get the CD out.

I have definitely recorded music that, in retrospect, I wish I'd gone back and done over. (Oy. That one note in "Christmas in the Trenches", and the speed problem on "Guenevere and the Fire", and... but I digress.) The schedule wasn't important enough to accept a sub-optimal performance, nor to rush the mix instead of taking a couple weeks to rest the ears, listen to other things, and not keep practicing those pieces. "Good enough" often sounds like a great idea at the time, but a year later when listening to the CD things are different.

Comments

[lyev.livejournal.com]

So you are planning on doing a solo dulcimer dance music CD then, right? ;-)

[cellio]

What part of "there is so much that can go wrong" did you fail to understand? :-)

While in principle I'm interested in doing a solo or mostly-solo recording, it wouldn't be all dulcimer pieces. I'd want to include a fair bit of vocal music (for which the occasional non-me accompanist wuld be helpful). Well, as long as we're fantasizing let's throw in the home studio, supporting digital music, which could address some of that...

(In reality, probably the only way a solo project would happen is if I could (1) work on it piecemeal over months or more and (2) feel free to experiment. In other words -- treat it as a low-pressure hobby. This pretty much means having my own equipment and some reasonable sound-engineering clues to go with, at least for recording the raw tracks. But, well, this hasn't bubbled up nearly far enough for me to have even begun to think about how I would do this.)

There are a few different types of music that I enjoy doing (or experimenting with), and they don't play nicely together on a single recording. Two are folk and SCA-period; depending on the specifics they can work together. One is Jewish music, which doesn't really go with the other two. And something I have an occasional hankering to play with is digital music (I'm describing a genre, not just instrumentation), which really doesn't go with the others.

All that said, I wonder how long it will be before "an album", in the traditional sense, is a quaint bit of nostalgia. How long will it be before we're all buying individual tracks that we like and burning our own collections (MP3 player, Ipod, whatever)? Will we see "suggested collections" that correspond to old-style albums, but -- unlike those albums -- no compulsion to take the tracks you aren't interested in?

clarification

[cellio]

How long will it be before we're all buying individual tracks that we like and burning our own collections

People are, of course, doing that now. I meant how long until that's the only way most music gets bought?