Context in Sound Recordings

As a producer, mixer, and recordist, I am often invited into the source material of a piece of music when an artist seeks input on specific aspects of the composition, song form, or lyrics. Other times an artist might have these elements in place but they want help finding the recorded context in which their music might exist. Sometimes these conversations move along the lines of analogy, something like “I was picturing the sound of a piano in an old cottage by the ocean, windows and doors open on a fall afternoon” or “I want the feeling of sitting by a fire on a cold evening in a remote cabin” being similar to conversations I’ve had with musicians in the studio. In either case, it is rewarding to listen to an artist’s intention and to contribute to the creation of a vision of the sound environment. Since a song or piece of music does not necessarily imply a definite environment or context in which it ought to exist, these decisions can be challenging and exciting. They also tend to be ongoing decisions through the entire process of making a record. So what is involved in determining this context for a song or piece of music and how do we decide what the character of the sound will be?

There is a texture to sound recordings that not only has to do with the specific musicians, the sound of their instruments, and the content of what they are playing, but also with how the instrument(s) are featured in this recorded world. Decisions around what sounds to pair with a singing pianist or solo guitarist, for example, contribute to an ambient environment in which the song or piece of music is delivered. This is sometimes called arrangement and in traditional contexts a music arranger is someone specifically hired to reconfigure an existing composition through attention to chords, melody, instrumentation, tempo, and dynamics. In many modern recordings, however, producers and mixers contribute heavily to the arrangement, albeit with different tools than a traditional arranger might use. This process is preceded by the need to define foreground and background, and it is the importance of the background that I intend to highlight here. The background accompaniment with its specific tone and textures deeply influences the values and expectations we bring to a recording, as well as its emotional impact, regardless of whether or not we are conscious of this while listening. 

I often record singer-songwriters in the studio and many of these musicians want to make a record with drums, bass, guitars, harmony vocals, keys, and percussion. This is a dense sonic environment but not an unfamiliar one across multiple genres. We know the palette of tones. Whether or not this big sound can work for the song or piece of music, I have found that pursuing this type of density does not always compliment an artist’s strengths or weaknesses. And it often follows from an artist undervaluing the power of their solo musical voice. Don’t get me wrong, I love dense arrangements and a wall of sound when they make sense. But how can we decide if they make sense for the music at hand? To this end I tend to start by drawing my attention to emotional awareness - how does the song/piece of music feel? Will the addition of drums or tuba or whatever distract from some emotional focus that might be present in the raw musical material? Of course emotional reaction is subjective but in trying to find the context for the music in a recording, it is a reliable compass.

There is an album by the musician Chris Whitley called Dirt Floor that features Whitley playing alone, live in a room. Years ago I read that this album was recorded in a barn in Vermont in a single day because Whitley did not want to record it in a conventional commercial studio setting. I sometimes listen to this album and imagine how different it would feel if they had recorded in an airtight studio room, outdoors by a pond at night, or in an apartment in the middle of a city. The mythology around a recording plays a significant role in how we receive the music so I hesitate to draw conclusions about virtues of the specific approach or the superiority of one approach over another, but imagine if Whitley and his producer had chosen to add bass, drums, a horn section, synths, and layers of background vocals. That sound could have been interesting but in my opinion something would have been lost for this specific artist with this particular batch of songs. What would have been lost is a rawness of emotion, a sort of out on the edge of mountain with heart exposed to the sky type of feeling that permeates the solo recording they made.

Whether a specific context is better or worse is a matter of opinion but regardless, certain qualities that are perceived as flaws or mistakes in one musical environment may actually be assets in another. Or at least, what could be viewed as a deficit in one context may be neutral in another. Aspects of timing, for example, might draw more attention to themselves when accompanied by a rhythm section with a metronomic pocket versus someone singing and playing alone. Does metronomic timing matter? Yes! No! It depends! As a kid, I once took a metronome to a recording made by Delta blues legend Robert Johnson. I had my preconceptions about the superiority of metronomic tempo flipped upside down as his tempo varied wildly. As soon as I turned off the metronome I stopped paying attention to Johnson’s BPM and realized how off track I was to even pursue that thread. If Robert Johnson had been playing with drums, bass, and piano, the need for steady timing would have been more essential. But wouldn’t something have been lost from the emotion of the music if it had been gridlocked to unwavering time? Not to mention how Robert Johnson backed by a band would have conveyed an entirely different emotion than the solo artist who stopped just long enough to change history through his recording.

Accuracy of intonation can be another area where the context of a recording greatly influences meaning. If you add an orchestral string section, intonation of the vocal shines under a brighter light than if you accompanied that vocal with a beat up piano mic’d from inside a coffee can. There are certain old reggae albums that I love where the horns are out of tune. If it were today, these pitchy horns would most likely be auto-tuned as a default first step of mixing. And maybe that would be the right decision (I’m not against auto-tune or time correction) but the decision becoming habitual means that something about context is at risk of seeming like the only option. As soon as you commit to quantizing and gridlocking everything, sample supplementing drums, auto-tuning vocals, you’ve created a certain kind of frame for your music. If you elect to record a guitarist performing live on a city street, you’ve created a different type of frame. If you accompany piano with cicadas, an owl, or the sound of a running stream how does it influence the emotional arc and impression left by the listening experience? I produced an album with pianist/composer Wells Hanley (album link here) where we did exactly this and the field recording context became a guiding principle that significantly impacted the shape of the music. 

I realize that there can be market-based variables for these decisions about how a record should sound. A pop country artist recording their songs accompanied by bagpipes and backed by a herd of sheep may not be great for sales. And what I’m writing about here may have less relevance for touring bands that want to record the sound that they have cultivated on the road than it does with studio bands or solo artists looking to discover a sound. Maybe. Even bands can benefit from questioning the context of their recorded sound and its implicit assumptions and rules, though. In recording it is sometimes but not always true that less is more. Sometimes live recording makes sense and other times multi-tracking works better. Minimalism can be great but so can a density of sound. Studio recordings can be amazing but so can recordings made in less traditional settings. Time or tuning correction can be helpful or detrimental to the emotion or statement of a recording. Fundamentalism about an approach is secondary to the need to remain continuously aware that the choices you make about instrumentation, so called means of “correction,” or the relative presence or absence of the world of sound that exists beyond the studio doors greatly shape the resulting recording.

In recording you are world building. The meaning you create defines the weight given to supposed strengths and weaknesses in the music. The choices I mention above are creating a set of values that inform a listener about what matters and what doesn’t in the context you’ve created around the music. Maybe a parallel would be “umami” as a harder to define experience of taste. The recording context is its umami. I’m not sure that comparison makes sense. Here’s another one - if the sounds recorded are a fish, the context of the recording is the water in which the music swims.