Author Archives: Frank Filipetti

World News

The METAlliance Report – The METAlliance on Miking

Posted on by Frank Filipetti
metalliance
The METAlliance includes: Frank Filipetti, Elliot Scheiner, Chuck Ainlay, Al Schmitt, Niko Bolas and George Massenburg.

The METAlliance — Al Schmitt, Chuck Ainlay, Elliot Scheiner, Frank Filipetti,  George Massenburg and Niko Bolas, along with the late Phil Ramone and Ed Cherney. The METAlliance Mission is to promote the highest quality in the art and science of recording music.

Chuck Ainlay and I were talking about microphones. We thought that it might make a nice column. Then we thought, “Wait a minute—we have the greatest resource in the world right here in the METAlliance. His name is Al Schmitt!” So, I interviewed Al. We not only got a great column, we got a whole series—here’s a portion:

Frank Filipetti: What is the first thing that you look for when you’re deciding on a microphone for purchase, or to go into the studio? Is it frequency response, polar pattern, off axis response, emotional response?

Al Schmitt: I think it’s more emotional than anything. I’ve been doing this for a long time and working on every kind of microphone you can imagine at some point in my career, and yeah, it’s become an emotional thing. I’ll have a favorite mic I love to go to on certain things; sometimes it’s a condenser mic, and sometimes it’s a ribbon mic. It depends on the artist and the circumstances of what we’re doing, and how we’re going to do it. If it’s somebody like Michael Buble, who wants to sing right in the middle of the rhythm section with the band, I’ll use a [Neumann U] 47 on him, in a cardioid position to get some rejection from the other side. He’s got really good microphone technique, so that works for him. Some others, you can’t do that.

Frank: You like to use a U47 in cardioid—part of that is because you’re looking for rejection, but are you also looking for any proximity effect?

Al: Well, a little bit of proximity effect, but it’s more about the setup. If the artist is in an ISO booth, you might use a different mic than if you had them in the room. It also depends on how much time you have—if you’re overdubbing a vocal, guitar, whatever, and you have time, then you can experiment with mics, have a couple of different mics up there, see which ones you like the best, and it’s a great learning process. When you’re doing that, you think, “Oh, I love this 47 a lot” or “This [Neumann U] 67 sounds pretty damn good to me.” And “How about that [Neumann] M50, or even [a Shure] SM7?”  It goes on and on.

Fortunately, we’re blessed; we get to use the best microphones in the world. A lot of people who read these magazines have little home studios, and the most expensive mic they have might be a $300 microphone or even a USB. They have to do the best they can with what they have. I’m fortunate that I have a great microphone collection; I know you do, too. And when I work at Capitol, they have unlimited mics.

Frank: Not only do you have unlimited access at a studio like Capitol, but you know they’re all in tip-top condition.

Al:  Yeah, absolutely.

The METAlliance Report: Sound Aesthetics – It’s Written in Stone

The METAlliance Report: The Recording of Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’

Frank: Let’s say for example, you have an artist who wants to be in the room with the musicians. Do you encourage or discourage that, especially if the producer wants to punch-in or be able to tune the vocal later?

Al: You don’t punch in, especially if they’re in in the middle of the section and you have all that bleed; you’re gonna hear that unless you’re punching in everybody at the same time, so yeah, you can’t do that. You’ll have to redo the vocal as an overdub and then fix whatever parts you want to fix that way.

Years ago, when you couldn’t punch in, the singer sang with the rhythm section and you needed to keep the vocal on top—and you learned which mic works best. Experience taught you how to use your microphones for separation and isolation. In the end, it’s the years of that experience that teaches you how to do that.

Frank: How about today’s way of making records, where isolation of every track is placed at a premium for fixing and tuning after the fact?

Al: Making vocals perfect always bothered me. Some of those recordings, where every note is right on the mark, it just becomes robotic. It doesn’t sound like a human after a while. Frank Sinatra didn’t sing every note in tune. The great thing is, you can fix a thing here and there, but to go in and tune every note, do we really have to do that? I don’t know; I don’t like to make music like that, and I try to stay away from that.

Frank: I do, too. It’s what I call the stonewall effect—that the old stone walls with their lack of symmetry grabs me more emotionally than the newer walls with their straight lines and perfect symmetry. When it gets too perfect, you lose that emotional response.

Al: Totally agree.

To be continued….

The METAlliance • www.metalliance.com

World News

The METAlliance Report: Sound Aesthetics – It’s Written in Stone

Posted on by Frank Filipetti

Metalliance I recently had the good fortune to find my dream home in a sleepy little Connecticut town along the shore. One of my favorite features of the area is the pervasive use of stone walls to mark off property lines. Our village was founded in pre-revolutionary war times and stone walls are everywhere in all shapes, sizes and designs.

Our property has several distinctly different periods of stone wall building and I began to consider how each variation appealed to me. Eighteenth century walls can be haphazard, having deconstructed over the decades until they’re often no more than piles of rocks, while many of the newer walls are more idealized with meticulously shaped stones, straight lines and even capped concrete.

The METAlliance Report: The Recording of Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’

So, what do stone wall aesthetics have to do with sound design? Well, for starters, I realized that each of these types of walls moved me emotionally in differing ways. The older, more random (less planned) designs appealed to my sense of well-being, nostalgia, history and oneness with nature. The more perfected designs appealed to my technical sense, giving me a feeling of symmetry, solidity and order—but they also left me cold emotionally.

No other art form is so intrinsically connected to the emotions as music. Popular music began a transformation in the early Fifties from the sophistication of Porter and Gershwin to the foundations of blues, “race music” and rock and roll. Early excursions into simpler melodies and structures mostly relied on an emotional performance as opposed to sophisticated structure.

By the Seventies and Eighties, recording techniques had evolved from a strictly organic process (just get it on tape) to the sophisticated use of multichannel and overdubbed tracking. As the capability to separate the bass from the drums from the voice became widespread, we also began to produce an arsenal of tools to help us improve on the performances themselves. The facility to duplicate (fly) tracks, correct timings, and tune voices and instruments became an integral part of the mixing process.

By the beginning of the 21st century, producers and engineers had a tremendous palette of movers, denoisers, tuners and duplicators to choose from, and with each new tool, we moved closer and closer to “perfecting the imperfect.” Today, we can tune a voice so perfectly that it sounds less human and more robotic. Have we gone too far?

If you look at the oldest stone wall, imagine this represents the music/recordings of the Fifties and early Sixties. Tracks were recorded live and released warts and all. As with the stonework, we had tension and release due to the imperfections. “Tension and release” is what emotion is all about. There is a primal appeal to these vintage recordings, as the performance was king, regardless of the musical or sonic imperfections.

As we moved into the Seventies and Eighties, popular music evolved into more sophistication harmonically, and our ability to fix and remix multitracked recordings became more the norm. Consider the second, more recent wall as a visual representation of this—there’s cleaner lines and shape, but the rough edges and quirks are still there.

Contrast that with the most recent wall, representing 21st century pop production. The lines are technically more perfect, ultra linear by design and topped off with a crisp, clean exterior. It may be aesthetically pleasing to some, but to me, emotionally, something is lacking. I can appreciate the “perfection” in the work, and I can enjoy the symmetry and polish for its own sake. But emotionally, it leaves me cold.

Over the past decade, I have found myself being utilized as more of a fixer than a mixer. My job is now to correct every possible “mistake” in a recording rather than spend the bulk of my time creating an emotional arc to the music. “Mistake” is in quotes as most of these “mistakes” are audible only after having looped the recording for dozens of times.

Now if all this work contributed to better and more emotional music, count me in. But I believe the boring state of modern music is not a result of inferior songwriting or performers, but instead due to the insecurity of the producers and engineers who can’t appreciate a gifted singer sliding into a note from a non-gifted one just missing it. Emotion is about tension and release, and by tuning and fixing every possible musical parameter, all we get is well-crafted boredom.

So, the next time you feel tempted to fix everything, ask “at what cost?” To my way of thinking, “Art is in the imperfection.”

Multiple Grammy-winner Frank Filipetti’s credits include Number One singles such as Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” and “I Don’t Want to Live Without You” (which he also produced), KISS’ “Lick It Up” and The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.” He’s worked with acts ranging from Korn and Fuel to Barbra Streisand and Elton John, and has also produced, recorded or mixed albums for Carly Simon, George Michael, Dolly Parton, Rod Stewart, Luciano Pavarotti and James Taylor, among many others.

METAlliance • www.metalliance.com