Making a Scene Presents - Great Performances Beat Great Equipment

Spend enough time around recording musicians and you eventually witness a familiar little ceremony. Someone finishes a take, listens to the playback, makes a face normally associated with discovering something unpleasant in the refrigerator, and decides the studio needs an upgrade. Perhaps the microphone is not expensive enough. Maybe the preamp lacks whatever invisible magic lives inside transformers made during the Eisenhower administration. There could be something wrong with the converters, the monitors, the cables, or the plug-in collection, which already contains enough virtual compressors to control the dynamics of a small country. Whatever the culprit may be, it is remarkably comforting to believe that the disappointing thing coming out of the speakers can be corrected by something arriving from a delivery truck on Thursday.

Sometimes it can. Equipment matters, and pretending otherwise would be silly. A noisy microphone can make a quiet vocal difficult to record, an untreated room can turn a beautiful acoustic guitar into something that sounds as though it was tracked in a tiled bus station, and poor monitoring can fool an engineer into making decisions that collapse everywhere except inside the room where the mix was created. Good tools remove obstacles, and the history of recorded music is full of musicians and engineers using technology creatively enough to change what records could sound like.

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