[Dixielandjazz] fixing and recording art

[Ministry of Jazz]

Shalom Jazz Fans,

Regarding purism and fixing and art in recordings, I am afraid I just wrote
the book. My about-to-be-released CD consisting of 59 minutes and 16 songs
played entirely by myself on 10 different instruments (and in some cases
multiple parts on the same instrument) took 6 weeks and 140 (count 'em)
hours of studio time. Thankfully I had a dedicated engineer who liked the
project and was willing to keep his cost within reason.

In this project, playing songs, or even individual parts, in one take was
not possible, not because I was unable to do so, but for a variety of
technical reasons, including:

* the first track or two served only as guides, and rarely were adequate
quality for the final version. Try playing one instrument that will be mixed
with 4 to 8 others for a 3 to 5 minute song when there is no lead or other
accompaniment part to play off of. Parts had to be put down just so they're
there for the others to work with, and then the first parts were re-recorded
once they could work off the other parts. The end result is a much more
natural sound than trying to do each track in one take. And believe me, we
tried that too.

* from one chorus to the next the arrangement changes, the lead changes, and
we often had to build each chorus by itself, recording the parts in
different orders, and then put them together into the final version of the
song.

* I found I had difficulty playing long and difficult trumpet parts without
breaks for the duration of some of the songs because my chops would simply
turn to jelly. Not everyone will have this problem. But maybe because I play
on various mouthpiece sizes, my chops are not as strong as they could be if
I focused on one. So I often recorded one or two choruses at a stretch,
rested a moment, and then continued. Or did a banjo or washboard track
between the horn tracks so I could rest the chops.

* I am very new on the clarinet and have no performance experience on the
thing yet. Some of the parts I could play straight. Others we tried to
record straight, but the quality was not there. So we would record 2 or 3
takes, then sit and pick the best phrases from among them and weave them
into one clarinet part. Try to tell which is which on the disk! It was still
all my playing, and we worked with whole phrases, not individual notes or
licks, nor did we doctor the recording with technical tricks to disguise bad
playing. All we did was giving me something I now have to live up to when I
play live.

* on the trumpet and mellophone, there were some very high notes that I
admittedly had a hard time hitting clean repeatedly. After sound checks,
false starts, technical glitches where a good take did not get recorded and
had to be done over, the chops would start to fade. So there were cases
where we took a clean version of a high passage from one place and cut and
pasted it into other places where the passage appears but the recording was
not clean.

* of course we found notes here and there that were out of tune or the
timing was off after a song was recorded, and so we went back and replayed
those notes, usually with their context, to fix the intonation and timing.

Both the engineer and myself felt that artificial gimmicks like reverb
should be kept to a bare minimum, just to enhance fullness and presence of
the instruments. Everything was mixed based on all the effects set to
"flat", so what came out is a nice mix of natural sound. And as Jim Kash
mentioned, we also changed the track order numerous times until it flowed
nicely.

I have worked on other recording projects where they recorded various
musicians track by track, and then put the whole thing together. In some
cases (not on my disk, but on the others), recorded parts were combined
successfully in ways that were not planned or foreseen at the time of the
recording. But the engineer and producer discovered later that certain parts
worked well together. All part of the art of recording. This was not
possible years ago, but it is now, and can even be done on your home
computer.

The end result is like a fine painting. Hey, I can't perform these tracks
live anyway until they make some advancements in cloning. You don't make a
painting by throwing a bucket of paint at the canvas so it gets painted in
one take. You work the various colors and strokes and areas of the picture
until the whole thing emerges as a complete work. As someone said, recording
is an art that is separate from performing. We all know you can get away
with a lot of mistakes in a live performance, but a recording memorializes
the mistakes forever. So who would contend that we can't fix them in order
to present a work of fine art as the finished product?

By contrast, my Doctor Jazz Band CD was recorded virtually in one take, in 4
hours of studio time, 2 of which was set-up and sound checking. Then there
was another 6 hours or so of mixing and mastering, not more than 10 hours
altogether. But it was an entirely different project.

So, OK, I'm spilling some of my secrets here before my CD even hits the
market. But we're all big boys and girls. I am just thrilled that what began
for me as a novelty project has produced some quite decent music for my
current level of skills and experience.

So did I mention I have a new CD for sale....

Elazar "Don't blame me, I'm just marketing my work" Brandt
Doctor Jazz Dixieland Band
Tekiya Brass Ensemble
Jerusalem, Israel
www.israel.net/ministry-of-jazz
+972-2-679-2537