Capturing the Magic: Challenges and Triumphs in Recording

Performers want to perform, it’s as simple as that. There’s a certain magic that’s generated on stage, a perpetual feedback loop between the audience and my experience on stage: As the audience’s excitement grows, my enthusiasm grows with it; and when my enthusiasm is reflected in the music, the audience’s excitement increases; and so on and so forth. But, attending live performances isn’t always a readily available luxury: for starters, I can’t clone myself and play in every city every weekend. This is the principle of why recorded music exists.

Again, don’t forget that as performers we’re built to have a stage presence, we’re trained to interact with the crowd in front of us. But, in the isolated confinements of a recording studio, performing feels very different. When I’m on stage, I can almost feel the audience breathe life, breathe purpose, into my interpretation. All of a sudden, in the recording studio, I can’t count on that reciprocal magic, but, instead, I have to artificially develop it. 

It’s hard to hype myself up when it’s just me and my guitar, and a bunch of engineers bickering about microphone placement, spending hours locked inside a sound-dry room, being asked to play the same phrase over and over again. The sheer repetitiveness of the experience makes the stakes feel much lower in the studio than on the stage. On stage, I only have one shot to get it right, and the adrenaline that the audience provides gives me the drive to do the very best that I can: every second I spend on stage with the audience is a second that I must spend well. On the other hand, in the studio, we’re all striving towards sonic perfection, meaning that I get the opportunity to re-record a piece, or even a phrase, as many times as I need until it’s just right. That prolonged excitement I usually feel on stage begins dissipating after the first hour of sound checks in the studio. The solution, and it’s one that I struggled to cultivate for many years, is a mindset change: I have to walk into the recording studio mentally prepared to motivate myself with the natural excitement that overcomes me when I’m in front of an audience. And some days it’s harder than others:

In my most recent album, The Blue Album, there were several pieces that took hours to record, specifically one piece comes to mind: Claude Debussy’s enormously famous “Clair de Lune.” Due to the fact that this piece has been interpreted countless times, it challenged me to bring something new to the interpretation. On top of that, this piece was originally written for piano, so there were certain modifications I had to take into consideration to achieve the pianistic lyricism of this piece on the guitar. “Clair de Lune” took over two hours to record, and even with the challenges it presented, I think that the recording that we released is unique and moving.

Another challenge that recording in the studio presents is the idea of the microphone as the middleman. While it’s common to think of the microphone merely as an amplification device, ready to instantly reproduce your sound, the reality is that every microphone picks up something different. Think of it this way:

All music, all sounds, really, are a series of sound waves made up of different frequencies. Each microphone is calibrated to give priority to some frequencies over others: some microphones are better at capturing the human voice, while others are specifically made for percussive sounds, and then there’s the ones that are fantastic at capturing the guitar. It all depends on the manufacturing of the specific microphone. 

In other words, imagine you’re relaying an important message to a friend that cannot be transmitted through electronic means, “I need to reschedule our Saturday brunch to Sunday at 12pm, but the reservation is still at the same restaurant.” However, you can’t talk to this friend directly, so instead you have to ask someone to give them the update. Depending on who’s giving them that update, they might stress different aspects of the message that aren’t necessarily as important: Maybe they stress the fact that the brunch is at 12pm, but they fail to transmit the importance in the change of day; or maybe they highlight the location of the brunch, instead of the schedule update. Microphones work in a similar fashion: Choosing the right microphone is like choosing the right person to relay the message. 

When microphones act as the middleman between my acoustic sound and the listener’s ears, there’s a naturality that’s hard to reproduce. Part of the acoustic quality of the guitar is the physical sound that is produced when my fingers hit the strings, which tends to be subtly percussive and is heard between the lines of the melodic and harmonic pacing of any piece. As a concert guitarist I was taught to avoid intrusive “finger noise” as much as possible, but if I were to play the guitar about a foot away from you, you’d hear some type of unavoidable “finger noise” that is the physical result of my nails hitting the strings, even in the face of technical perfection. This type of noise gives music its genuineness. Guitar notes that are electronic or artificial manipulations don’t always sound real, sometimes they don’t even sound like a guitar at all. In most cases, this is because the realness of the sound can only be reproduced by an actual human strumming or plucking notes. The actual contact of my hands on the guitar, along with other considerations like the physical aspects of my phrasing, or even when I choose to inhale and exhale, are what audibly differentiate real playing from electronically generated music. For classical music, producers strive to make the recording sound as natural as possible; they strive to bring the audience as close to the real thing as they can. 

This has been the guiding philosophy of all of the producers that I’ve worked with. Furthermore, most recently, in The Blue Album, the producer was able to capture the naturality of the instrument through his microphone choices and placement. The microphones were so close to my hands, that he was able to deliver a mix that really approximates my authentic sound. There are two songs in this album that highlight this in particular, “Etude in E Minor, Op. 6: No.11” by Fernando Sor and “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” by Ryuichi Sakamoto. I was amazed at how these recordings came out and I highly recommend using quality headphones or speakers to enjoy them. 

While live performances will always be my preferred method of artistic communication, nowadays there are so many great resources producers use to fully immerse the audience, replicating a live experience. For The Blue Album the production team used Dolby Atmos to generate the intimacy I wished to reflect. With this technology, every song in the album sounds like I’m playing the guitar specifically for the listener. With a quality set of headphones or speakers, it should feel like I’m right there in the room with you, giving you a private concert.

At the end of the day, whether you’re listening to me play on stage or whether you’re streaming my music, my goal is to connect with you, the listener, on an emotional and spiritual level. In fact, that connection is what drives me to be a better musician every day. Even though it can be challenging to perform without an audience, the hours I dedicate to my recording sessions are well worth the effort if it means that my music is more accessible to more people.

Click on this link to listen to The Blue Album!