In this article Julian considers where microphone placement and recording techniques in general have left the original intention of “High Fidelity’?
Hi Fi or high fidelity. We take the phrase for granted but records have an increasingly tenuous connection with “fidelity” in the strictest sense. When did that happen and does it matter?
Fidelity - the degree of exactness with which something is reproduced, used to be easy to understand. Try Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner if you want a comprehensive account of the early development of sound recording and reproduction but to summarise, it was always about faithfully capturing reality. For popular music this hasn’t been the case for a long time.
Reality - Disappointing?
This article was in part inspired by a conversation among the team in which I jokingly mused that when you look at it reality is basically pretty disappointing. I hope I don’t really mean that but the point I was making is that while lots of us might talk about capturing “the sound in the room”. To a contemporary audience, real sounds, as they exist in real rooms are unwelcome and in some cases a little jarring. Isn’t “real” a bit old hat these days anyway?
When writing this article about voiceover mics I did some reading around the subject and a very interesting point was made about the development of the U47/U67/U87 family of Neumann mics. The practices and expectations of the recording industry when the U47 was released compared to when it was replaced by the U67 (1947-1965) are vastly different and one of the biggest changes was the emergence of close miking. I’m sure we’ve all heard the story of how the Beatles had to get written permission from the Abbey Road bigwigs to put the mic inside the bass drum.
Mic Placement
There are lots of things which get far more attention than mic placement. The development of tape machines, particularly the effect of multitrack techniques, artificial reverberation, the use of compression. All of these are really important but as we all know, it starts with where you put the mic. The use of close miking is an understandable short cut to a hyper-reality, HD, sharp focus version of the original sound. It’s no surprise that it has become standard practice but if we stop and think about it very few of the sounds we hear in the world happen within inches of our ears and when they do we pay attention. Immediately.
The Sound In The Room
Vocals which are miked from 6 inches or less, acoustic guitars from similar distances. Drums from a couple of inches away and electric guitars mics which are literally touching the cloth(!). All of these sounds are a long way from what we hear “in the room” and to an audience used to these hyper-real, close sounds, usually compressed to bring them even closer and frequently brightened to add sheen, is it any surprise that given source material which has already been hyped up to be attention-grabbing that we sometimes find ourselves underwhelmed with an accurate recording of musicians playing in a room?
An excellent example which makes this point is Elbow’s Picky Bugger. The contrast between the claustrophobically close-miked vocals in the verse and the “singing into the corner of the room” chorus is deliberately jarring and while undoubtably “real” is a rather ugly sound. Listen to the contrast at 1.10 in the track to hear what I mean. A faithful recording of the sound in the room but probably a little too real for everyday use!
Of course fidelity is alive and well in classical recording. Capturing an accurate picture of the sound in the room is the aim of a classical engineer, though it’s a lot more complicated than the uninitiated might imagine. There’s more to it than just putting up a stereo pair and hitting record. Jazz covers the middle ground, with very faithful recordings at one end to production values identical to pop production at the other - I hate to break it to you but I understand Buble uses Autotune (gasps…).
Back To Reality
So why and when did so many abandon what was the original intention of recording? Taking the example of visual media, my partner is a visual artist. She, and most of her peers are dismissive of photorealism. Art which looks exactly like the thing being represented isn’t of interest to most artists. They will say that you “might as well take a photo”. The point is that, while we might admire the skill of the person drawing or painting so accurately, it is at the end of the day an act of imitation. They are trying to represent what is in front of them accurately and without distortion.
This sounds a lot like recording to me!
Most good art isn’t strictly representative. It turns up the bits that the artist likes about what they are capturing and downplays what they are less interested in. This sounds like recording and mixing to me.
Artistic Licence
Ever since recordings have been made we’ve been tweaking reality. Moving quiet instruments closer to the single microphone in the early days. Les Paul stacking Mary Ford’s vocal harmonies for “impossible” self harmonisation. I could go on but it would be a long list. Recently I saw a discussion over the eternal “Drummer’s or Audience perspective” debate when it comes to panning drums. The point was made that drummer’s perspective would be much closer to a modern drum sound because the drums are panned wide from the drummer’s point of view. From the audience point of view, presumably located a good distance away from the kit, the drums would be virtually mono. It’s hard to argue with the logic there.
Returning to my earlier point about capturing or interpreting a performance when recording. As long as we keep in mind that, by using mic position and processing to make sounds big and exciting we are demanding the listener’s attention then there is no harm in taking sounds based in reality and taking them somewhere else. However no listener can pay attention to everything at the same time. The more things we hype up, the more things we need to calm down to produce a satisfying listening experience and hopefully allow the music to connect with the listener rather than batter them.