Grey, my dear friend,
are all theories,
but green is Life's
golden tree.
Goethe
Tone-Pearls Recording Technique
Tone-Pearls Recording Technique is an application of our scientific research of music, tone and hearing. Read more about Tone-Pearls.
We intended to develop a recording technique that provides the experience of "to be there". Investigation has shown, that the beneficial effect of Tone-Pearls is more present in analogue recordings than in digital recordings. The less manipulation we apply, the more faithful is the recording. Thus we developed a pure analogue recording technique. However, the heart of the recording procedure is the effect of Tone-Pearls.
Tone-Pearls Recording Technique
The first step is the idea: The idea of music, performance and musicians. The recording is mostly determined by this first step. You should have a clear idea about the music to be recorded; you should feel in your bones the music.
The second step is to find a place that suits to the music to be recorded. The atmosphere of the venue should be in harmony with the essence of music. The acoustics of the place should be in accordance with the tone-image of the music. We found that venues with history would sound better than new and modern ones.
The third step is the arrangement. After cognition of the venue, we try to find out the ideal arrangement of musical instruments (and musicians), microphones and recording staff (yes, it is terribly important!). It is an extremely time consuming process, but it essentially determines the final result.
The fourth step is quite unique. Having found the almost ideal arrangement, we place Tone-Pearls on different places of the venue according to the principles of music and space.
The fifth step is fine-tuning. We tune and refine the arrangements of everything in the room.
So we are ready to record. The steps above are only the milestones of the prerecording procedure. There are many subtle details, of course, not described above.
Recording equipments
Music is captured by just a single pair of AKG C 414 Limited Edition microphones, directly connected to a Nagra IVS TC reel-to-reel tape recorder with Vovox cables. RMG 468 tapes with 15 ips speed are used for recording.
The carefully placed Tone-pearls are also part of the recording inventory.
Finalizing the master tape
Because the music is recorded direct to stereo, there is no opportunity for mixing or manipulating it, after the recording has been made. We do not want to manipulate the recordings. Our experiments revealed that ANY manipulation decreases the quality of recorded music. I mentioned music and not sound. I admit that the sound quality can be improved by post-processing. However, the music is more than sound.
We use adequate devices to achieve excellent sound quality. If the recording has been made adequately, there is no need for further and subsequent improvement of the sound quality.
We always use live recording and record entire pieces of music. We do not use cut to create a track from separate recordings.
Additional topics:
"Almost Analogue Digital" a special digital copy of the record
