{"id":9834,"date":"2018-05-03T16:21:53","date_gmt":"2018-05-03T23:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=9834"},"modified":"2022-01-12T11:53:44","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T19:53:44","slug":"recording-classical-guitar-sage-advice-from-engineers-john-taylor-norbert-kraft-and-ricardo-marui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/recording-classical-guitar-sage-advice-from-engineers-john-taylor-norbert-kraft-and-ricardo-marui\/","title":{"rendered":"Recording Classical Guitar: Sage Advice from Engineers John Taylor, Norbert Kraft, and Ricardo Marui"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
BY BLAIR JACKSON | FROM THE SUMMER 2018 ISSUE OF CLASSICAL GUITAR<\/a><\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

For more than 30 years before I took over as editor of Classical Guitar<\/em> (in December 2014), my main job was working as a writer and editor for Mix<\/em>, the leading American recording and sound magazine. I wrote literally thousands of articles, big and small, about nearly every aspect of the sound world, from nuts-and-bolts pieces about the making of this or that album, to the intricacies of recording sound effects for blockbuster films, to forums with engineers about every imaginable topic dealing with sound. It\u2019s a wonderful community of brilliant and artistic people who are completely committed to the pursuit of quality. Just like all of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I\u2019ve spent so much time in studios, watching sessions and talking to engineers, producers, and musicians about what they do, I reflexively listen to albums (and watch films) paying acute attention to the quality and nature of the recording and how (or if) it affects the presentation of the music. A badly recorded album is a sad thing\u2014a wasted opportunity. So I\u2019m happy to report: Over the past three years that I\u2019ve been immersed in listening to classical guitar, most of the hundreds of albums I\u2019ve heard have been well recorded, even though the circumstances of their creation vary widely\u2014from a single stereo microphone placed near the guitar in an acoustically unremarkable room, to ambitious projects utilizing multiple microphones and expensive signal processing equipment in spectacularly ambient chapels, concert halls, or professional recording studios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in all my years of writing about recording, I\u2019ve never penned an article specifically about capturing the sound, power, and subtle nuances of classical guitar, so I decided to seek out three top engineers in the field to educate me (and you) about what their job entails, how they do it, the philosophies behind their methodologies, and the equipment they use. I know that more and more guitarists are putting out their own albums these days; perhaps they will learn something from the way these three masters work their magic. I sent all three engineers the same questions and was thrilled to receive such thoughtful, articulate, and illuminating responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

English engineer John Taylor recalls that his first sessions \u201cwere ones where I was in the firing line of the microphones, as a member of the Omega Guitar Quartet, back in the late 1970s.\u201d Those sessions were recorded by John Bower, who had engineered Julian Bream\u2019s RCA albums since the early \u201960s, and Taylor was instantly hooked on recording. Unlike most audio engineers, \u201cI had no training in recording studios, but started out as a classical guitarist who happened to have studied physics at university,\u201d says Taylor. \u201cAs such, I had a natural curiosity about the theory and practice of recording, which I picked up from books and magazines.\u201d His first \u201cserious\u201d recording was of his own quartet, and then he was off and running, evolving to become one of the top classical engineers and producers in the UK. His extensive guitar credits include David Russell, Eliot Fisk, Tom Kerstens, Ricardo Iznaola, Nigel North, Eleftheria Kotzia, the Eden Stell Duo (and spinoff Vida Quartet), Roberto Moronn P\u00e9rez, Xuefei Yang, Juan Martin, Fabio Zanon, Paco Pe\u00f1a, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Austrian-born Canadian guitarist Norbert Kraft is arguably the most prolific classical-guitar engineer and producer of our time. Besides his successful (ongoing) career as a guitarist, for which he has travelled the world and recorded more than a dozen albums, and as a principal at Naxos Records (where he is Artistic Director for the label\u2019s Guitar Collection), he has recorded\u2014and usually produced\u2014scores of classical-guitar albums by both up-and-coming players (first albums by GFA and other competition winners) and established masters. It\u2019s a stunning list that includes such notables as Ricardo Gall\u00e9n, Ana Vidovic, Zoran Dukic, Pablo Villegas, Nigel North, J\u00e9r\u00e9my Jouve, Antigoni Goni, Ali Arango, the Brasil Guitar Duo, Adam Levin, Shin-Ichi Fukuda, Anabel Montesinos, Marco Tamayo, and Irina Kulikova, to name just some. He remembers his first recording sessions as a performing guitarist as \u201cnerve-wracking and high-pressured affairs, and it never seemed that we had enough time to get to the musical essence of my playing before the producer barked: \u2018We have it; time to move on.\u2019\u201d Later, when he started recording other artists for Naxos, \u201cI kept that memory clearly in my mind, never to make them feel cheated or impinged on musically.\u201d Kraft, who records many non-guitar classical albums as well, says that when he was a teenager he was interested in electronics and actually wanted to become a recording engineer: \u201cI laughingly say I simply took a 30-year detour, performing and teaching at university level, in preparation for the level of work I do now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brazilian engineer Ricardo Marui is also a classical guitarist, and from 1990 to 2004, \u201cI often played as a chamber musician, and I recorded a few CDs in that period. My first commercially released recording as a musician was in 1993\u2014an album where I played in a duo with a violinist. Since I was also a trained electrical technician and systems analyst and had an easy time handling new technologies, I was actively involved in the production of my own recordings, and even edited my own tracks.\u201d He began engineering for others in 2002 (a cello record by Zygmunt Kubala); a disc by Gilson Antunes became his first classical-guitar recording. Since, he has worked with Marcelo Kayath, S\u00e9rgio Abreu, Marco Pereira, Fabio Zanon, Jorge Caballero, and others, several of those for the high-quality GuitarCoop label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CLASSICAL GUITAR: <\/strong>How has the way you record classical guitar evolved through the years\u2014if at all\u2014and is it changes in equipment or recording technique that have affected that evolution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John Taylor. Photo by Ioannis Theodoridis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

JOHN TAYLOR:<\/strong> There have been a few big changes over the years, beginning with the advent of digital recording and CDs in the early \u201980s, and since then the increasing sophistication of analog-to-digital conversion, digital editing, and all sorts of new digital tools for manipulating or cleaning up audio. Personally, I have no great nostalgia for analog tape recording, which at its best could sound warm and clear, but suffered from many problems, such as \u201cprint-through,\u201d which caused pre- and post-echoes on music with a wide dynamic range, such as classical guitar. This might seem an odd thing to say of such a quiet instrument, but in fact the full dynamic range from the quietest touch on a string to the loudest rasgueados<\/em> is a challenge to reproduce successfully in a recording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, digital recording got off to a bad start for audiophiles by promising \u201cperfect sound forever\u201d but delivering some recordings that were so starkly clean that they were as much fun to listen to as taking a cold shower while biting into a lemon. But I have to say that, even from the start, my own experience with digital recording was positive\u2014for the first time I was able to make recordings that were hard to distinguish from the live feed from the microphones. And these days the best digital converters give a beautifully sweet and transparent sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in terms of the capture of the sound with microphones, I would say that there have been no major advances in the last few decades, unless you count multichannel surround sound, which has never caught on as a mainstream medium for classical music. Many of the microphone models from top manufacturers such as Schoeps, Neumann, and AKG are almost unchanged since the 1970s or even earlier, except perhaps for lower-noise electronics. And some engineers are even prepared to pay a fortune for ancient tube mics from the 1940s or \u201950s, which they believe have never been matched for their unique sonic character\u2014though I\u2019ve never been tempted myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve spent much of my working life as a one-man team of engineer and producer resisting various temptations\u2014especially the temptation to use ever more elaborate multi-mic setups, and to use all the digital tools now available for \u201cenhancing\u201d the sound in various ways, or for eliminating every tiny flaw or extraneous noise in the playing. After all these years, what I like most is to record as simply as possible, using the minimum number of mics\u2014if possible, just one for each stereo  channel\u2014carefully placed in a venue that\u2019s just right for the music being recorded. And what\u2019s more, if I can see the project through to a final edited master that has no signal processing whatsoever\u2014EQ, reverb, compression, etc.\u2014I\u2019m very happy to leave it like that! This is such a minimal approach that many recording engineers would regard it as a dereliction of duty. But here I feel I have an advantage, in that the engineering is only one part of my job of seeing through a whole recording project. So I\u2019m happy to keep the \u201cengineer\u201d in his place if he ever tries to justify his existence by getting too elaborate or clever for his own good!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"recording
Norbert Kraft in editing mode.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

NORBERT KRAFT:<\/strong> I would say that aside from becoming more efficient and better at prioritizing details, I learned after the first few years not to \u201cget in the way.\u201d In my keen desire to get the best out of my artists, I would sometimes become overly zealous\u2014not by trying to change the way they shaped the music, but by simply trying to get more of their own creativity to work better. This sometimes backfired, and the player would clam up rather than become more free. So a real aspect of my work has to do with the psychology of the situation, and learning to recognize when the artist can\u2019t be \u201curged\u201d any further. Some players, on the other hand, really thrive on this and welcome all musical suggestions, which then becomes a truly creative musical partnership on the session. This is especially true when I record chamber music, and I really get a charge out of feeling that I am an integral part of the performance, rather than just a bystander. One might think that once the mics are set, I simply sit back and let the players have at it. But my real session work is similar to that of a film director, guiding and shaping the performance from a perspective that the artist cannot possibly have. I am hearing as a \u201clistener,\u201d rather than from the players\u2019 perspective on the stage, and the mics actually \u201chear\u201d differently than the performers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With regard to mic techniques, purists will say that \u201cone microphone\u201d is best for the cleanest, most natural sound; or at least just one point-source for the stereo pair, such as in an M-S recording setup. I have used this to good effect, and still do for part of my setup, say in piano recordings, or when I have another set of omni-directional mics in the far-field. But generally I use only a pair of omnis for 95 percent of my recordings, resorting to more mics only when the situation requires. In general, more is much less when it comes to microphones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I do play with a lot is the different character of various mics. I have some lovely tube mics, as well as some rather \u201cclinical\u201d-sounding mics at the other end of the spectrum\u2014all of which claim to be \u201cflat\u201d in response. But we all know that every mic has its own character. It\u2019s not unlike the different characters of various instruments. Most guitarists have several guitars, even from the same maker, each of which has its own personality, suited to different musical genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ricardo Marui in action. Photo By Marcelo Guanabara<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

RICARDO MARUI:<\/strong> The first change has to do with my concept of what it means to record. In the beginning, I thought that a good recording should be as close as possible to the real sound of the live instrument\u2014that is, that the sound of the speakers should be exactly the same as the sound I would hear if the musician was playing right in front of me, in the same room. Through the years, though, I realized that beyond the physical and acoustical impossibility of achieving this, there are many other factors that make a recording valuable to the listener. People have in their memories the sounds of albums that marked their relationship to music; recordings that are forever part of their memories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although we are now in the 21st century, with regard to classical guitar, people have as references the legendary recordings of Segovia, Julian Bream, Duo Abreu, and many other exceptional artists. The playing on these recordings is marvelous, but from the point of view of physics alone, they do not try to reproduce the live sound of the instrument, and for this they are no less spectacular. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing that has changed, this time regarding recording technique, is that as I became more selective with respect to the acoustic quality of the spaces in which I recorded, I also developed some of my techniques for capturing the sound of the instrument. In spaces where the acoustics were less favorable, I used to use directional microphones closer to the instruments, as well as microphones that were a little further away\u2014in an effort to compose a stereo image of the sound\u2014but the audio of these [distant] microphones could rarely be effectively used. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, working in better spaces and with better equipment, I can record the sound of the instrument, and the space as a whole, using omnidirectional and figure-8 microphones. By figure-8 microphones, I\u2019m referring to ribbon microphones, which have become my favorites for recording classical guitar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

CG: <\/strong>Here are a couple of interrelated issues: Can you briefly talk about the challenge of capturing both the full range and subtle nuances of the guitar? And when you choose to record a guitarist in a relatively reverberant environment, such as a church or concert hall, is your miking approach different than if you were recording in a conventional studio?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KRAFT:<\/strong> I very rarely record in a dry studio and nearly always use acoustic venues. These vary, of course, depending on the instrument\u2014piano or string quartet require a different acoustic than Baroque orchestra, or opera, etc. The great challenge is to find the \u201cperfect\u201d venue for whichever instrument is involved. For guitar, I found a truly magical space right at the beginning\u2014some 24 years ago\u2014and have always recorded myself and other guitarists there. [St. John Chrysostom Church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada] When entering the space for the first time, some of my younger artists look with dreamy eyes and call it \u201cthe Naxos church.\u201d It is a bit of an odd-shaped building\u2014a church of about 600 seats, very high at the altar, where the performing area is, and with five segments at the lower rear wall that reflect back to the stage as almost a sort of horn effect, making the reverberation quite long and complex. This gives me the freedom to come quite close to the instrument and capture the essence of its sound, almost like hearing the wood \u201cbreathe\u201d as it\u2019s played; magic indeed!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an art to finding the right \u201cbloom point\u201d for each instrument, and mixing that direct sound with the right amount of reverberation, depending on whether the result should be more \u201cdry,\u201d such as for contemporary or Classical-period music, or a more \u201cRomantic\u201d effect with more reverberation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s an example of one of Norbert Kraft’s fairly recent recordings :<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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