The Jan Diaries — Production Processes: Recording

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 15 September 2021

After a summer split between his own productions, client work and commercial jobs — sound logos, advertising — Jan Kinčl noticed the same thing happening in project after project: the people on the other side of the conversation did not have the vocabulary. Mixing and mastering in particular get used almost interchangeably in everyday speech. So he started a run of columns explaining the studio to laypeople, one process at a time, beginning here with recording and continuing in a second instalment devoted to the mix.

What the piece covers

The definition is deliberately plain: recording means using microphones to capture a voice or an instrument and store it, on tape or on a computer, for later work. What a modern studio can do to that signal afterwards is close to unlimited — and none of it matters as much as the skill of the person standing in front of the microphone. A vocalist singing the wrong notes, unclear diction, an instrumentalist with loose timing: none of that can be repaired in the mix and still sound natural. Kinčl states the axiom flatly. There is no such thing as fix it in the mix.

The historical section is where the argument gets its teeth. Early jazz big bands were recorded through a single microphone, with the balance set by where each player stood — the lead vocalist closest, therefore loudest. A song was one performance, which demanded real instrumental command and real discipline. Imperfections were unavoidable even on expensive productions and nobody minded, because listeners expected a record to sound live and human. A hit needed a strong composition and an exceptional performance, and the reason James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson still land decades later is the emotional charge in the delivery. Then the 1990s arrived: multitrack recording onto hard disk, cheaper hardware, cheaper maintenance and editing software that grew more capable every year. Suddenly several takes could be assembled into one perfect one and pitch could simply be corrected.

The part that stayed

Kinčl frames that shift as a paradox rather than a villain. The technology made results technically correct, not necessarily better; some musicians now practise less because the correction is waiting, others use the same tools to genuinely extend what they can do. His own position is that character and uniqueness are bound up with the imperfection inherent in an emotional performance, and that over-correction is what made so much contemporary music sound the same. In practice he works as though editing did not exist, hunting the take with the best emotional content and acceptable technical execution, allowing small fixes only where the humanness survives. A successful session, in his definition, ends with a raw recording that already has magic in it — the mix only makes it more so.