This week we had a guest lecture from Ken Blair, an acoustic, classical, and jazz music recordist. He’s also the owner of BMP recording based in the Lincoln Sparkhouse, however involves traveling lots to places such as London.
Classical music recording involves recording a number of instruments at the same time. Due to this there aren’t usually overdubs. If someone makes a mistake, a whole new take needs to be made, and cuts can be made in the editing process to cut the better takes together. Ken explains that during classical music recording it’s not normal to spot mic each individual instrument, and would usually utilise stereo recording techniques.
Ken works more for publishing as there isn’t as much classical music releases anymore. He says that his biggest clients are companies that produce audio books and music syllabus training for music exams.
His routine on a normal recording day would start around 6 to get to London to set up for around 8 and start the session at 10. He would set up the microphones first. One of the positions, he would use a broadcast stereo technique ORTF, using matched pair of 414’s 14cm apart at 110 degrees. Because an orchestra doesn’t fit in a studio, a hall is usually used; therefore a control room has to be built from scratch. An issue with this being there needs to be a way to get all the cables into that control room. Ken showed us some pictures of halls in which there where holes in the wall for this purpose, and some where he, done this himself.
He then moved on to talk about the roles. That being producer and engineer, and how this can sometimes be the same thing, but very different jobs. He talked about how he needs to keep track of each recording with a recording log and needs to be able to read music pretty well, especially when editing the music together.
Ken then talked about how he got into the industry. He started by doing a degree in sound recording, this was a sandwich course involving 2 years course, 1 year placement and 1 year course. He managed to grab an opportunity in a well-known studio abroad. Since then he has been engineering and teaching for around 15 years.
This lecture was extremely useful and interesting has Ken then gave us some advice on how to get into the industry, whatever the speciality is. He advised to treat people well and this creates goo relationships that could lead into more work. Make a CV that is skilled based, with the first page completely selling yourself.