Recording String Quartet and Piano

Ann Gates has a remarkable story

Late on in life Ann has taken to composition, which for her was an epiphany. She has long been a lover of the contemporary music art form, but then, inspired by her faith, she felt compelled to write the music she heard inside her.

Ann found mentorship with local film composers in the Wimbledon area and has been studying a course at The Royal College of Music. These two original pieces are outputs from those activities.

Unassuming in person, but with clear musical ideas, Ann contacted me in need of help recording a string quartet and a piano solo. She had already sourced the performers and a recording location with a specific piano, but was nervous about the recording side of this project, as she has very little experience of what it involves.

A simple request for a clear and honest recording

It was my job to capture the honest performances by Reflections Strings and pianist, Dominic Doutney, with the goal of achieving clean, open sound. We also organised a videographer to film the performances for Ann to share.

Recording live performance is as much about the space as it is about the instruments, and you can’t replace the performances in editing, so it’s crucial to capture the sound in the room as pristinely as possible. It’s a simple request but that is not always easy; you can get caught out if you don’t prepare properly.

Preparation pays off when recording on the day

It was important that we took the right equipment, so we visited the hall beforehand to measure the room tone quality and the sound of the piano, which helped me decide the kind of of mic array to use.

When recording in an unknown venue, it’s silly, basic things that can jeopardise your goal, so we went through checks like making sure the heating could be turned off, because the radiators were air blowers, that there was no ticking clock, no office telephone connected and the lights didn’t make a buzzing sound, and of course the traffic noise wasn’t disruptive to the point that we couldn’t record.

Why it helps for a recording engineer to read music as well as know his gear

Because I’m a reader of music it helped Ann feel safer in my hands, as I was able to contribute to performance feedback and be a second pair of eyes over the musical accuracy as it was played.

Because of the preparation I put in with the videographer as well, the music and film recordings both went very smoothly on the day. Ann was able to bring a few guests to the performances and enjoy the process.

Mastering contemporary classical music

The mastering of the recordings was tricky because there are such wide dynamics in the classical style of music and, unlike pop, there’s no kind of standard level. In fact, trying to limit these tracks into the commercial pop standards would not be helpful, because in pop the dynamic range is a lot less, so you can push the volume up across the whole song and enhance the feel without distortion. However, in this style of music the dynamic range is so much greater, that you would risk over-compressing (making louds softer and softs louder) and then destroy the integrity of the music. Overall, I’m confident we got the results that Ann was looking for and hope that we can record more of her work in the future!