Remote recording
Remote recording, also known as location recording, is the act of making a high-quality complex audio recording of a live concert performance, or any other location recording that uses
One important benefit of a remote recording is that the performers will respond to the audience; they will not be as distracted by the recording process.
To make a remote recording, studio-quality recording equipment is trucked to the concert venue and connected to the concert
A remote recording is often made using a specially built remote truck: a rolling recording studio carrying a
History
Remote recording developed out of the practice of making field recordings with high-quality equipment. The earliest such recordings were crude, undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with Ralph Peer in 1923. Peer carried a disc-cutting machine and recorded musicians directly to disc. From 1941 Alan Lomax became known for the field recordings he made of the various musical traditions carried to or created in the United States. In the 1950s, advances in microphones, mixers and tape recorders allowed more sophisticated equipment to be carried to a concert location, including more microphones, tape recorders with more tracks, and possibly a mixing console to mix multiple microphones down to fewer recorded tracks.
Not all remote recordings were well received by the public. For instance, in 1963 Chess Records hauled their monaural tape recorder to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to capture the Fourth of July weekend concerts including Bo Diddley's electrifying performance in front of 2,000 excited fans. The resulting album, Bo Diddley's Beach Party, did not sell well in the U.S.[6]
In 1958, American recording engineer Wally Heider mounted recording equipment in a truck, reportedly the first to do so. The next year, engineer Reice Hamel did the same. Both men used new techniques, bringing many microphones to a concert and mixing the performance as it happened—in the manner of a remote broadcast—recording onto stereo tape recorders for release as stereo and mono records. Hamel's first truck grew from simple to more complex in the first seven years. He started with stereo, obtained a three-track machine on which he taped a Barbra Streisand concert, then in 1965 he configured the truck as a complete recording studio. In 1966 he installed a four-track machine, then moved to eight-track, and by 1971 was recording on sixteen tracks.[7]
Many of Heider's recordings became hits or critical successes. One of them is the classic album
See also
References
- ISBN 0-295-98498-8.
- ISBN 0-240-80891-6.
- ISBN 0-387-28470-2.
- ISBN 0-7935-7358-0.
- ISSN 0006-2510.
- ISBN 978-0-8264-2966-7.
- ^ ISSN 0006-2510.
- ISBN 0-87930-744-7.
- ISBN 978-0-87930-926-8.
- ^ "Live At Monterey". AlbumLinerNotes.com. Retrieved July 17, 2011.
Recorded on Wally Heider's 8-Track Remote using 3M analog tape. Engineers: Wally Heider and Bones Howe.
- ^ "At Monterey Pop". AlbumLinerNotes.com. Retrieved July 17, 2011.
Remote recording by Wally Heider.
- ISSN 0006-2510.
- ^ Goggin, David (1988). "The Record Plant at 20". Mix.