In writing this piece I am not trying to downplay the knowledge that professional recording engineers have. Neither am I trying to diminish how good modern music sounds. I am only trying to point out a few things to consider as we travel along our musical pursuits.

There are many, many fine sounding instruments out there including both electric and acoustic. I totally get that we must amplify an acoustic instrument in order to play to a large audience or those in the back will only hear it faintly if at all. In a small setting or room playing to 20 or so people, amplification is not needed. When I play flute in my music room with the doors closed, my flute can be heard throughout the house. The walls dampen it considerably, but the sound carries through the whole house.

If I went outside and down the block, family in my house would not hear it without significant amplification. So we buy amplifiers to play to larger audiences.

I have noticed lately that there are portable amplifiers one can buy now that amplify the Native American Flute for playing to larger crowds. That, I mean, was why I thought they were purchased. I had opportunity to try one and it barely played louder than my flute by itself. So why then does one buy one of these? The answer seems to be to add reverb to the sound or echo and depending on the unit, both and in some you may even find chorusing and similar effects. The very first question I ask myself is: doesn’t the flute sound good as it is? Is one of those units needed for a Stradivarius? Do you find those units in use by members of orchestras?

What I think has taken place is over time, is recording and playback devices have evolved. With the advent of stereo, attempts have been made to mimic the directionality of sound. Consider that you are sitting in a living room and your friend takes out an acoustic guitar or his Native American Flute. He begins to play. It sounds really good. All by itself. If it does not, he bought the wrong flute. Do you expect to hear reverb and echo in a living room? There is a certain amount of reverberation in every room unless it is treated to prevent the sound waves from bouncing. If reverb is not expected, why then does one try to add it? The answer as I see it is to mimic what we would hear if the flute was played in a canyon or large auditorium.

I want to delve into “stereo” first. Do we hear in stereo? I think so. We have two ears hearing the sound waves and they are on opposite sides of our head so they are hearing the sound from two different vantage points. That is how we can determine where sound is coming from. Is the flute or guitar we hear in stereo. No. It is a mono sound source, but we hear it in stereo. That is to say we have two sound receptors. But, there is only one sound source. Stereo systems are an illusion. They play what is a mono source through two speakers and the sound level is different in each speaker. This trick effectively moves the position of the sound source. It is louder in one ear than the other so it sounds like it is closer to the left ear than the right or vice versa depending on where in the stereo picture the person mixing placed it. So we have a stereo source and stereo reception. Does that mean it is stereo stereo?

If you have a flute player and a guitar player in front of you, you have two mono sources and the directionality comes from where the musicians are physically located. We hear in stereo, but we hear two mono sources. In order to obtain “placement” of the musician in recorded material, you have to adjust the sound levels to “move” the musicians left and right. That works to an extent. Something is lost though.

If you take a sine wave and and duplicate it and invert it, assuming the actual start time is not changed. The two waves will cancel each other. The positive pulse will be exactly opposite a negative pulse at the same time so the effective output is zero. No sound. Anywhere two amplitudes coincide, there is a certain amount of cancelation assuming they are in phase. If you play two instruments through the same speaker, some cancellation takes place. Thus the sound you hear is not as full and rich as it would be if heard live, no matter how much quality is in the gear you have. Modern sound equipment has methods to deal with phase. You can invert phase and other things to help compensate for this cancellation. There is also the problem of reinforcement. Sound is cumulative. If you want proof go to a stadium and listen. The problem is at some point the electronic information hits the speaker coil. Ideally the best audio system, in my opinion, to play back a 4 piece band would be four indepenent channels playing through 4 speakers. You would then have a true reproduction of what you heard live.

We have slowly been convinced that stereo is the best way to listen to recorded music. I submit that it is not, but it is more affordable than quad systems or multi channel beyond quad. Quadrophonic systems were on the market awhile and may still be. I really don’t know. Home theatre systems use multi channel systems and they are coveted. I wonder why that isn’t used in audio only? Perhaps because of the mobile devices? The men that profit from music would have to produce more than one product to meet the demands of multiple markets. That cuts into profits. Maybe if they put effort into marketing? If it costs $1.00 to produce a product and 600 million people will buy it at $5.00 wow lot’s of money. But if it cost’s $1.00 to produce the same product multi-channel and only 100 million people will buy because the don’t want to be limited to listening only at home, it is easy to see why you wouldn’t want to make a specialty product. To compensate for the smaller market, you could raise the price, but we all know that would further reduce the profit. In economics there is the point of diminishing returns. To me, it is sad that economics limits what is available to us. So we go on buying and listening to stereo because it is more profitable for the producers.

I got side tracked a bit, but the main point of all the above is to point out that the sounds we hear are mono and we hear in stereo. Stereo systems attempt to reproduce the live sound and spatial characteristics.

So lets look at another piece of the puzzle. Which sounds better live or recorded? Having been to a number of concerts and having been a performing musician in rock and country bands since 1967, my vote would be for live. Live is better. No explanation. It just is. Why else would a band perform live? Do we go just to watch the musicians move around? Most of us can’t see nor do we fully appreciate what it is to play the instruments of the performers. We just like the sounds they produce. “Live” is an experience. Listening to the stereo is not. Live is different everywhere you go because of the differences in venue. Room size and acoustic characteristics, indoors or out, how close we sit to the band/performer or how far to the left or right all affect how the music sounds. Live is never the same experience. It can be close but it is never the same. That leads me to a question. Where should we place a microphone to capture that “live” sound? We should put it where the listener would be.

In my opinion and I’m sure there are many that would argue the point, two omni directional mics placed at head width apart with a barrier between them is the ideal. The dual mic arrangement should be where the most coveted seating is in the venue. Thus you would record each mono source where it actually is and how your ears would hear the sound. Our minds determine direction and such not our ears so it is safe to assume mics could substitute for ears as we record. A four piece band usually will have a drummer and he sits center stage. The bass is on one side and the lead is on the other. The fourth instrument is on one side or the other of the drummer. This arrangement isn’t a rule nor universal. The lead instrument can be center stage and drums on the left or right and so on. Point is there are four mono sources being recorded from stereo receptors where the listener would be. This would give you the listener the best chance at hearing it the way it was at a live performance. Trouble is we have things in electronics that color the sound or change it. Our ears do this as well, but that is normal. Microphones have response curves. Some favor highs and some favor lows. Purchasing a mic is an important decision. Ideally one with the same response curve as the human ear would be the best choise. Human ears don’t hear equally well at all frequencies. I don’t know for sure how mics do at various frequencies, but I do know there is a noise level in electronics so signal to noise ratio is important. To me, the closer you can get to capturing what the human ear can hear the better. I have read the human ears hears the frequency spectrum optimally at 85db, so when I mix that is the volume I make my reference monitors. If I am forced to mix in headphones I crank them until it sounds similar to 85db on open speakers. This is one way to compensate for the shortcomings of electronic processing of sound.

Sound studios go to great lengths to EQ music when is being mixed for production. This EQ process does not take place live unless each instrument is close mic’d and mixed into a stereo system for play through the main PA system. Various factors come into play when sounds are mixed. In a live setting of acoustic instruments it just is what it is. If each instrument were mic’d and mixed after the fact for production of a CD, all that “stuff” comes into play. What I’m saying here is one can come very close to producing a “live” sound, but to really do it, you have to be at the live performance. Phase cancellation complicates mixing. Frequency reinforcement (when two instruments are producing the same frequencies) leads to problems in how music sounds on sound sytems. The response characteristics of the speakers. It is a science in itself to mix sound for production.

So let’s assume it is all good and the flute player wants the listener to hear his flute as it would sound at a canyon somewhere in Arizona. So he adds reverb and maybe echo to the sound of the flute. The question is: where is the listener at that canyon? Is he standing next to the flute player? Is he on the other side of the canyon? Down in the bottom? Where the listener is determines what that flute will sound like. I guarantee you the flute player hears his flute differently than the listener that is 10 feet away in the venue. Most flute players including me, put the mic close to the true sound hole. A listener would never do that. You don’t stand with your head in front of the flute player and your ear 2 inches from the true sound hole. So why do we close mic? There is a thing about microphones. Proximity to the mic determines how “rich” how “robust” the sound is that is written to file. So we close mic, but that is at the expense of the room characteristics. They become way off in the background and that would not be true for the listener. If there is a best place to put a mic I would have to say it depends on what mic you have and what you are trying to achieve for the listener.

Let’s get back to the canyon setting. Let’s take the extreme. If the listener is on the far rim is he actually going to be able to hear your flute at all? That depends on how wide the canyon is. Sound dissipates with distance and how quickly is affected by numerous factors including air temperature, textures and shapes of reflective surfaces and so on. If for example he can hear your flute at half volume because he is on the opposite rim, in the real world you would have your flute low in the ambient sounds of the environment. That rim the listener is standing on IS the reflective surface that will create the echo you want him to hear, so he WON’T hear that echo. If he could it would not be as loud as the original flute sound. An echo is heard at a point other than the surface that reflected the sound. If the listener is standing by the flute player and at the far rim the volume hitting the reflecting surface is half as loud as the original, then it would follow that the echo heard by the flute player and the listener next to him would be half again as loud and that assumes the dampening of the sound is linear. There may be other surfaces that produce echoes and when the echo is heard and how loud it is heard is dependent on where the reflective surface is. It is more likely to be lower in volume than the flute is because it had to travel further than the line of site sound. The point of all this is, in the real world the echo is nowhere near as loud as the sound source. The odds of hearing a second echo from the same surface are very slim. But we flute players that mix sound and those that mix for us tend to make it that way. It tickles the ears and we enjoy the way it sounds. But, it is not realistic. We are making sounds that do not exist anywhere except in the electronic world or an elaborately constructed sound environment.

I’ve been playing music in front of and for people since 1955 and not once has anyone said that it would sound better if it had some echo or reverb. That is zero times out of thousands of performances over my life time. Is it wrong to add all the effects and EQ and “stuff”? No. Not wrong. Depends on what your goal is. Are you looking for a processed sound or a realistic sound? Do you want to hear the instrument as it actually sounds or do you want to hear what it sounds liked processed and EQ’d? Is there a correct mic placement? Yes and no. Correct placement is dependent on your end goal. There are convolution reverbs available that base the effect on real world samples and those are pretty good. But in my opinion it always come back to where is the listener in a given venue? Did they sample the reverberation at the source or where the listener would be?

I read a book once. A very comprehensive, in depth book that included how to construct the best sound studio and it covered all the aspects of mics, mixing, mastering and all that. At the end of the book the author summed it up. He said if it sounds good to you, you did it right. Some of the biggest songs of all time were recorded with an open mic in a garage. I won’t list the ones I know of. That info is on the web if you want to check it.

Music is art. It is much more than art, but it is art. The artist determines what his music should sound like. There is no wrong way to do it unless you are trying to conform to someone’s idea of what it should sound like. I for one, am not in competition with the “big boys”. In the first place, they aren’t the big boys. They are just the guys that got good at producing music that sounds the way the guys that promote and sell music want it to sound. I have no hard feeling or dislikes for the “big boys”, but I also don’t think they are any better than the average Joe that produces his own music. I respect their knowledge and their skills at what they do. I for one do not create art to make money. If it generates money that is great. I create it and share it because I truly believe the gifts I have are not for me but for other people. I create art and share it without cost. I do have an album for sale for those that my want the rights have copies for themselves. The art I create is for the sake of creating art. If people like or not, is not in consideration. I like it when they do, but I don’t write music with the purpose of making it sound good to others. I’m not trying to sell it so there is no need to consider the market. Is it wrong to produce art with commercial goals in mind? No. Is it wrong to create music so a larger audience might like it? No. There is a feeling I get when I do a painting and it turns out just like I envisioned it when I started. I get the same feeling when I build a nice deck for the back yard area. I create songs that I hear in my spirit and I make them the way I hear them. When it turns out that I think others might enjoy it, I share it. Does that make me any better or worse than the guys are trying to make money with it? Nope.

I would not presume to tell a painter he used the wrong shade of blue or his composition violates the well established norms for painting. His painting is what it is and it is as HE wanted it to be. Same thing with music. If a person uses a cell phone to record their flute song and they are happy with the way it sounds, then I either like the song, the way it sounds or I don’t. I appreciate music for the music that it is. How well it is recorded or mixed and such is an entirely different matter. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than the sound of a fine acoustic instrument in an intimate setting like a living room. Do I do the other stuff? You bet I do! I like that too! But to me, nothing compares to sitting in front of a musician that is playing a piece that touches me deeply and moves me. The presence of that musician adds to the experience in a way that transcends this physical world. Some would argue that. I’m just expressing an opinion and belief. The closer I come to that setting the better I like it. But I also like echo that is loud enough to double up with the original sound. It has a nice sound all its own.

So it’s all sort of like golf. You think about all the “stuff”, but when it’s time to hit the ball, you just gotta hit the ball. I would rather listen to a musican that can hit the ball rather than one that knows how. My favorite musicians are the ones that touch me with their music. I don’t care has fast they can play a riff. If it doesn’t reach me, it is just well executed note patterns.

I do not expect any responses to this. If it provokes thought, good! I am not looking for nor will I debate the validity of what I’ve expressed here. I’m just putting it out there as the thoughts I woke up with this morning.