studio stuff
Step into the Studio!
-
an introduction
On this page you'll find short notes from Bill about various pieces of the recording process itself. The first entry following this introductory note introduces Anne's main compositional tool: her piano.
As people become more and more at ease with their computers, they're finding that there's lots more available to them than word processors and spreadsheets, and maybe there's even some audio software pre-installed on those machines. Our hope is that some small glimpses into how digital recordings are made might increase your appreciation for what goes into a recording, and in this way increase your enjoyment of music listening in general. Perhaps you might even be encouraged to dig more deeply into the world of digital audio yourself if you're so inclined and bring out that inner musician you've been hiding.
Within just the last few years, an incredible amount of technology has become available to many more people than ever before. And the list is constantly growing. Chances are that something on that list can help you to connect with your creative side and express yourself through the language of music.
I hope it's clear by now that this section of our website is aimed at the newcomers to all of this, so you won't see too much in terms of the technical details. In fact, oversimplification will be rampant. But hopefully there will be some interesting stuff as well for those that, even if they have no intention of participating in music or audio recording, would like to know more about how recordings come into being.
-
Anne's Piano
Curious about what Anne is using to create the wide variety of sounds that she's been recording? Unlike an acoustic piano, her Roland FP-3 digital piano can produce a limitless variety of instrumental and electronic sounds, with the help of an external synthesizer module which she controls with the piano keyboard.
Minus the external synth, the piano has an assortment of about forty different voices which includes acoustic and electric pianos, as well as organs, strings, brass, percussion, and more. The external synth takes the number of possible voices into the thousands. In fact, the synth module will probably be the subject of a future article here, because an amazing amount of sound sculpting is possible with it that cannot be done using the piano alone.
Classically trained pianists, Anne included, tend to be particular about the feel of the keys beneath their fingers as they're playing. The response of the keyboard to touch has much to do with the expressivity that follows. There's a whole range of key action available out there, from the soft, springy type found on some synthesizers, to others that are very close approximations of the acoustic type. According to Anne, the Roland keyboard is an excellent simulation of one found on an acoustic piano. And that makes her fingers very happy.
-
Digital Sketchpad
Our digital age has provided today's composers with quite a number of advantages over their predecessors. One of these is the ability to hear their compositions as they are being developed and put to paper, rather than having to wait for an opportunity (and the financial backing) to gather the necessary number of musicians together to perform the composition live. For someone working with many layers of instrumental voices (or 'crayons' as Anne likes to say), this is a huge advantage.
That's not to say that composers don't 'hear' their works without a room full of musicians, because typically they do. Many composers will tell you that their job is to put down on paper, or otherwise record, what it is that they hear in their heads. Only today those sounds don't always have a match in the roster of orchestral or traditional instruments. Synthesizers have broadened the sonic palette to include textures of vast complexity which can be difficult to combine successfully with one another without much experimentation.
Anne's current sonic sketchpad, a Fostex MR-8, is a digital multi-track recorder which enables her to overlay one instrument atop another in succession, and yet keep those layers separate in case she feels the need to substitute one sound for another while the textures are being worked out. Once satisfied with their interplay, she can then combine them into two tracks and free up some space for additional layers. Being a self-contained mini-studio about the size of a book makes the recorder a convenient alternative to turning on the more complex studio equipment, especially if all Anne needs is to work out some instrumentation ideas, or to try an alternate arrangement of the score. Though we prefer to do the final recording at a greater bit depth for much finer audio resolution, the Fostex is more than adequate in sound quality for the initial scoring process. This way Anne can stay in the creative zone, rather than being bogged down by the technical demands and distractions of the full studio.
