What is a good recording?
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsIn response to my post Making Peacea reader asked the question “what exactly is a good recording?” Great question and here’s what’s interesting: we all know a great or poor recording the moment we hear one.
At one of my seminars yesterday I was demonstrating the PWD streaming music and selected an unfamiliar Miles Davis track out of the many I have in the library – it sounded dreadful from the moment I turned it on. I turned and looked at the crowd in the room and every face clearly reflected the same sentiment. I had chosen poorly and immediately went to a more familiar piece from Something Blue, an album I know to be a good recording.
I don’t know enough to be able to analyze and pick apart what makes something sound good or bad but I can tell you within seconds its quality – so can you and every person that listens to it on a highly resolving system.
The fact any one of us can instantly identify good from bad is significant – I am just not sure what it means.
Do you have a list of known good/recommended recordings? I used to do a lot of car stereo installs and I had a reference CD I used to dial in equalizer settings. Some of my go-to tracks were: Live/Mirror Song, Madonna/Vogue (or just about any track on The Immaculate Collection), Michael Jackson/Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough (or just about any track on HIStory), No Doubt/Hella Good, Gwen Stefani/Rich Girl, and Babble/Tribe. These are not necessarily my favorite artists/tracks, but after listening to thousands of songs in my music collection over and over these stand out as being very clear with a wide dynamic range that don’t fall apart when cranked up.
What is a good recording? What is a good photograph? What is good art? A consensus of opinion is that one element seems to be that they capture a moment, an event, a sense of what it was like or would be like being there. If you take photographs it makes a memory vivid. It may also give insight into something otherwise overlooked. On a cruise to Bermuda I met a professional freelance photographer who was occasionally published in National Geographic. Although we had similar cameras I was an enthusiastic snap-shooter, he was a real photographer. He taught me tricks and techniques about how to look and see I’ll never forget, tricks not disclosed in the library of books about photographic technique and composition I’ve accumulated.
I’ve got two recordings of the same Dixieland band from the same record label, consecutive catalog serial numbers, same musicians, same arranger, same studio, same equipment, same everything but different recording engineers. Equalize the system optimally for either and the other one is way off. I’ve got three recordings of the same pianist playing the same piano in the same place made by the same recording engineer at different times. All three are different. Adjust for just one of them and the other two have obvious tonal colorations. Clearly where accuracy is paramount meaning hearing what you remember or imagine, and because there are no performance standards as we live in a world of total anarchy and chaos, finding what we imagine to be accuracy is difficult, elusive, time consuming, and sometimes you just throw up your hands only to try again another time. The more complex the system, the more powerful the tools for adjustment, the more opportunities for mal-adjustment but also the more opportunities for superior results. Where there are few if any adjustments available, it’s hard to see how most recordings won’t be judged poorly by critical listeners. Otherwise they’re just fooling themselves.
I judge music whether live or recordings of music by at least four elements; composition, performance, tonality of instruments, and acoustics (yes I actually listen for the acoustical effects since it plays such a major role in what I hear and I’ve trained my hearing to be very sensitive to it.) Some years ago on what was almost a dare on a blog site I purchased a recording many felt was the one they’d pick if they could have only one recording on a desert island, “A Love Supreme†by John Coltrane. I will tell you right off the bat that I do not like this recording, it falls short for me on almost all four accounts I listed above. Among its technical shortcomings as a recording is the very poor sound of the piano which sounds to me muted, muffled, too soft, not clear, and too small a source for a piano at a fairly close distance. I’m not happy with the drums either, they seem to have not enough impact, especially the disappointing drum roll opening the third section (there’s no lack of bass response in the systems used that lead me to this conclusion.) I’m not sure if it’s the recording technique being out of balance, too loud or too soft in this case (a common problem that’s usually unfixable in the final mixdown consumer version), the performance or maybe both but it seems anemic. I’m sure others like those on the blog site that provoked me to buy it along with many others Coltrane fans would sharply disagree with everything I say about it.
So what is a good recording? I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about it these last several decades. If I come to any tentative conclusions I’ll post them.
This may be a slight departure from your point but sometimes I wonder if listeners may react with more negativity to a recording they are unfamiliar with – considering it a ‘bad recording”, while even a piece that may not necessarily be a “good recording” may seem so because of it’s familiarity.
Perhaps, if I may re-phrase an old adage, it’s a matter of “unfamiliarity breeds contempt”
Paul, surely you mean Kind of Blue!?
Bad recordings perform sins of commission. Tonality or pitch are off enough that we notice. Or there is lack of clarity or audible distortion. An odd perspective can also be a problem…instruments too large or small, or incorrectly arrayed, especially with classical music, not right.
Great post. Quality is obviously a subjective tag applied through the filter of the sum of one’s prior personal experiences and future expectations. I think quite simply quality is something you find enjoyable and lack of quality is something you don’t.
I think this requires the combined interaction of the artist having created something with the potential for lasting quality, and the subjective recognition by the audience of that quality. Both are necessary.
If enough people agree with your conclusion, then a recording (in your example) gains lasting fame. If they don’t, it doesn’t. Sometimes this is immediate, sometimes it takes decades- I.e., Renoir, Van Gogh, et al, who only achieved lasting fame when their latent quality was at last finally recognized when their audiences finally caught up with them.
The room of people instantly agreed with you because you all must have shared enough common musical experiences to share similar musical opinions.
I dont think technical recording quality is necessarily always a requirement in order for a recording to be considered good either. For example, most who’ve heard them would agree that the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” or the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” are very primitive recordings. But enough people would also agree that these are great and enjoyable records to listen to. Like with modern art, there are many components to quality- color, emotion conveyed, etc.
By the way, did you mean Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” or “Somethin Else”?
Was the bad recording “Birth of the Cool”? Good music, terrible sound.
Good recording = anything Nigel Godrich touches 🙂
There are so many aspects to what makes a good recording/mixing/post production, but the most important is that the instrument/voice has to sound real, the human ear seems to have an amazing ability to determine a real instrument playing vs a recorded one, and the closer a recording gets to the real experience, the better the recording – and more chance of the ear being tricked.