I said, this is somebody I should know, but couldn't place it. Sounds weird.
You can see on the thing that it's Elvin Jones... recorded in a highly strange way, with this weird, thin, cymbal sound. He's a very distinctive, recognizable player. I have listened to him as much as anybody, on many recordings of vastly differing recording quality. We were both a little stunned— not that my ear wasn't good enough to tell it was him, but that you could make someone sound so alien to himself by recording him weirdly. And why would you do that.
Fascination not in a good way. The playing of course is great.
3 comments:
That's one of the reasons I started recording myself. For one thing, I wanted to understand why the recordings of my music didn't sound the way I heard it when I played it, and I didn't want to deal with engineers who thought they knew better how I sounded. Most engineers have a fixed idea of how to record each instrument and are not able to really record the sound that is actually there, nor are they aware of the different aesthetics that musicians use to develop their sound over decades. This recording is a very good recording in the engineer's sense: you can hear everything very well, separately and crystal clear. So much so that you can hear all the individual instruments from the drums, but not the overall sound that Elvin is all about. In this respect, the recording technique completely misses the music. I've spent a long time trying to figure out how to record my sound, and now I can talk to most engineers in a way that they take me seriously. But I'm definitely over putting up with that kind of thing.
I can only advise any musician to get involved with recording technology. First, the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, and second, we lose less money when we record because we save on studio costs.
It was really weird to hear that-- it's not like we haven't heard Elvin recorded a hundred different ways.
We should talk about this sometime! I'm pretty feckless about knowing about this-- I'm totally at their mercy. Someone has to do something pretty grossly wrong for me to correct them on it. On my records I use the same engineer all the time, who has maybe a prettier sound than I would choose, but it's all right. I do my thing and he does his, lol.
For starters, I can highly recommend Michal D'Angelo's mini-series on microphone positioning for jazz drums. Very well done and good advice.
https://youtu.be/5qz81uqVF7I?si=ZweBRPiQoXyMhkYJ
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