Re: [ARSCLIST] discography of "direct-to-disk revival"?

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re "careful" performances -- yes, I agree in a lot of cases. I think the techies might have 
intimidated the musicians in some cases.

One good example of balls-out is "Les Brown Goes Direct to Disc" on Century. Recorded at Capitol 
Studios. The notes indicate that they got around "careful" by two routes:

1) Les Brown's band thoroughly rehearsed all the material for a week as they had a week-long gig at 
Disneyland, in the same neck of the woods as Capitol Studios. They worked out the recording date 
charts each night after their last performance and had it nailed by session time. Now, I won't even 
get into the fact that back in ye dayes, top jazz musicians would get a chart at the recording date, 
run it down once and then cut tracks and usually nail it on the first take, but this was the late 
70's and Les's band was made up of a lot of younger guys then.

2) the Capitol and Century Records tech crew hired a local college concert band to be stand-ins and 
play the same charts so they could figure out mic placement and selections and the engineers could 
know when solos were occuring and other "control cues" (according to the notes). This tells me that 
they goosed the excitement factor at the console, but the end result is pretty darn good.

One screwup -- which I confirmed when I transferred to the DAW and looked at the waveform. I noticed 
the brass had flanging problems when the whole section was going. I figured, too many mics too 
close. Sort of. The mic that covers the lead trumpet player is out of phase to the rest of the 
section. It must have been wired polarity-wrong to the console or someone mistakenly flipped a 
polarity switch on the board. If they had followed the Stan Ricker school of LP cutting, they would 
have been closely watching an oscilloscope at the cutter and would have noted the polarity/phase 
problem. But it ends up being a minor annoyance and the overall product is very good. If one 
transfers it to digital and doesn't do any digi-compression or limiting, it's quite a 
"soft-sounding" result, but the German vinyl is so quiet, the answer is to just turn up the volume 
and enjoy the dramatic dynamics.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Lennick" <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 12:15 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] discography of "direct-to-disk revival"?


> There were a couple of Canadian labels that tried D2D..Umbrella did one or two
> with the Boss Brass and other jazz artists which were widely acclaimed at the
> time. RCA Canada did one with pop-ragtime pianist John Arpin (solo piano, pop
> material, not the most exciting thing I ever heard..sorry John). The one thing
> I remember about most D2Ds I heard was that they were all very CAREFUL
> performances. I know other people had more positive impressions.
>
> Norman Field, over on 78-L, has referred a couple of times to a trad jazz band
> recording for a British label that had decided to produce its first LP and
> hadn't acquired any tape equipment yet, so that was D2D in 1950!
>
> dl
>
> Mike Richter wrote:
>
> > Tom Fine wrote:
> > > There was Sheffield, Century, M&K Realtime (they did a couple of D2D
> > > before they were digital pioneers). I can't name any other specialty
> > > labels right off the bat. Didn't some of the majors experiment with
> > > this, maybe just for classical and jazz?
> >
> > How about RCA (Japan)? Just one example of which I'm aware: the
> > Appassionata Sonata which I believe we discussed earlier. To wrap it up
> > neatly, it was pressed at 45 rpm and distributed in the U.S. not by the
> > parent company but by Audio Technica.
> >
> > It's miked more closely than I prefer (I've never before heard a piano
> > sonata with my head under the lid), but anyone who has ever heard a
> > Boesendorfer Imperial Grand will recognize the sound immediately. In
> > contrast, a contemporary digital recording of Chopin by Malcolm Frager
> > issued by Telarc had lost all character of whatever instrument he played.
> >
> > Mike
> > --
> > mrichter@xxxxxxx
> > http://www.mrichter.com/