One of the things that engineers hate...I know I certainly do...is when you're in the recording studio and a musician says "I want my guitar to sound like........." ( insert their favourite guitar hero).
It's not just guitarists that are guilty of this, it applies to many other instruments too!
The thing is.... A very large percentage of a persons 'sound' comes from the person themselves and not the instrument or instrument amplification.
I can give a couple of examples of this....
On one session many years ago, in a well equipped and quite expensive multiple-studio complex, I was recording an 'indie' band who were recording their debut album. It came to the time to record the guitarist, no names mentioned in this blog, and it was taking a long, long time to get a decent sound. Various combinations of guitar and amps and cabs were tried...but it just wasn't sounding very good.
I spent time making sure that what came out of the cab in the studio was representative of what we were hearing on the studio monitors, moving microphones around, trying different mics and checking phase etc.
The producer (who was a reasonable guitarist) eventually got a bit tired of this and snatched the guitar out of the wilting guitarists hands and started to play.
As soon as he started playing.....the sound was good for the first time that day..he handed the guitar back to the guitarist and as soon as he started playing the not so good sound returned to everyones bemusement!
It was his 'style' of scratchy playing that was the problem and not the instrument, equipment or indeed the engineer (me).
More recently and not in a recording environment...I was giving a workshop on English bagpipe playing and one of the participants mentioned that my pipes sounded particularly mellow and tuneful, whereas his pipes were not so good....I got him to swop instruments with me...hey presto!,, his pipes were fine and sounded mellow and tuneful..whereas my pipes sounded raunchy and tuneless in his hands....I repeat my point...
The sound of an instrument comes mainly from the player him/herself.
Please remember this next time you start wasting recording studio time..and by the way...the same applies to drummers as well!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment