My Take on Music Recording with Doug Fearn

Send us Fan Mail You may remember Chuck Anderson from a 2-part episode we did in 2021, where Chuck and I had a wide-ranging discussion on many musical topics.  You can listen to those discussions here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/942952/9161095 https://www.buzzsprout.com/942952/9247297 Chuck is a jazz guitarist, composer, and studio musician who has played with many prominent people during his long...

Send us Fan Mail For anyone working in music recording, hearing is vital. But so also is our ability to listen. In this episode, I talk about the two ways of listening, and why both are important. Can you improve, even enhance, your listening ability? I offer some ideas on how you might do that. I also discuss how easily your hearing is damaged, and what you can do to preserve it. This episode doe...

Send us Fan Mail If everyone recorded music the same way, everything we did would sound the same. But we don’t record the same way, and those differences are part of what makes up our recording style. In this relatively short episode, I talk about how I developed my recording style, and outline some of the things we might do to help us each come up with our own style. I would like to hear from you...

Send us Fan Mail In this third and final part of my conversation with Corrie Lynn Green, we deviate somewhat from the technology of the studio and discuss the role of the producer.  There are plenty of additional topics that Corrie and I could discuss, and if there is sufficient interest, we can do more the next time Corrie is here for recording.  Let me know if you found this episode helpful, and...

Send us Fan Mail In the previous episode, I had a conversation with singer-songwriter Corrie Lynn Green explaining some aspects of studio technology and how it applies to musicians.  In this second installment, we talk about headphones and how they can affect a performance; what happens to the microphone signal after it leaves the studio and gets to the control room; consoles, mic preamps, and dig...

Send us Fan Mail For many musicians, recording in a professional studio can be an overwhelming experience at first. There is a lot going on, it’s all very technical and mostly incomprehensible. Jargon is thrown around. Things often move fast.  For a while, I have been thinking about doing an episode that explains, in the simple terms, the recording process for musicians. To help me, I asked singer...

Send us Fan Mail In the late 1800s, researchers were seeking a way to amplify an analog signal. The vacuum tube was invented in the early 1900s, but scientists were also investigating the properties of semiconductor materials. A very crude version of a transistor was developed even before the vacuum tube, but the technology of the day was better suited for tubes than transistors, and once the tube...

Send us Fan Mail Music recording is a technological process, but it also involves people. The technology exists to serve musicians, and the process of recording must consider the personalities of the people involved. This episode looks at how those human interactions work, from the perspective of the recording engineer. How do you deal with difficult people? Or insecure people? What does it take t...

Send us Fan Mail There are many different uses for recorded music, and we explore a somewhat unusual application in this episode. My guest is Karttikeya. He only uses one name. He is the engineer and often a musician for Music Together Worldwide, which produces music for early childhood education. Music Together’s goal is to instill a love of music in kids from infants, up to 5 years old. There ar...

Send us Fan Mail The instruments on a recording should all be in tune with each other, right? In this short episode, I discuss how instruments are tuned, and why even with today’s remarkable tuning devices, there’s more to tuning an instrument than looking at a colorful display on the head of a guitar. Thanks for listening, commenting, and subscribing on any of the dozens of podcast providers that...

Send us Fan Mail I take a behind-the-scenes look at a recent recording project I am working on as producer and engineer, explaining the technical details of the session, along with the pre-production planning. This episode has samples from the individual tracks, plus earlier versions and a close-to-finished version. The artist and songwriter is Corrie Green, and this is one song from a 12-song pro...

Send us Fan Mail In the previous episode, I asked listeners to send me their recordings for my critique. In this episode, I play five of the songs submitted and offer my comments. I try to limit my remarks to things that the engineer has some control over, like the mic’ing, amount of room sound, any eq or compression, the mix, the use of processing and effects, loudness and levels, and how the eng...

Send us Fan Mail Recently several people have suggested that I do a series of episodes featuring listener-submitted recordings for my critique. At first, I was not particularly enthusiastic about this idea. Sure, I can make lots of comments on someone’s recording technique. But where do you draw the line between technical issues and more abstract creative decisions? I’ve thought about this quite a...

Send us Fan Mail Stereo has added new dimensions to our recordings, an effect that is difficult or impossible to achieve in monaural recordings. New immersive formats, such as Dolby Atmos, add even more dimensionality to music. You can achieve a kind of stereo by panning mono recordings of various instruments into the stereo field, but that is not what this episode is about. I talk about how to us...

Send us Fan Mail My conversation with jazz guitarist, composer, writer, and teacher, Chuck Anderson continues in this episode. We talk about recording his early albums, his trio, solo guitar compositions, and practical advice to aspiring musicians. We discuss the value of silence, why we both rarely listen to music, and details about the recording of his latest album, “Spontaneity.” You can learn...

Send us Fan Mail Chuck Anderson is an amazing musician. Not only is his technique on guitar remarkable, he is also a solid businessman who has made his living from music since he was a teenager. Over his long career, Chuck has worked with the top singers in the music business. But his steady passion is teaching. Since he was 16, he has taught thousands of students. He instructs them not only on th...

Send us Fan Mail John O’Reilly Jr. is a studio drummer who spends most of his time recording drum tracks for clients in his studio. He talks about his experiences leading up to his business, “Boom Crash Drum Tracks.” Our conversation covers much more than that. We talk about his philosophy of drumming and music, the challenges and rewards of providing drum overdub tracks, and his commitment to tea...

Send us Fan Mail Direct Stream Digital (DSD) is a different way to record music in a digital format. The concept goes back to the 1930s, and it has been used to record music for at least 20 years. But DSD has not been widely accepted in music recording because it has some serious limitations, which require changes in our normal workflow habits. This conversation with George and Geoff Hazelrigg is...

Send us Fan Mail Geoff and George Hazelrigg are not only my business partners, but also superb musicians with decades of studio experience. We seem to always agree on what makes a compelling recording. In this informal conversation, we talk about how artifacts of any kind will detract from the listener’s enjoyment. We share what we have discovered to be the best combination of gear and technique t...

Send us Fan Mail Major record labels and other music providers are committed to adopting Dolby Atmos and other immersive audio technologies. There is a huge amount of work available to re-mix a label’s entire catalog in the new formats. Dale Becker, of Becker Mastering in Los Angeles, has become an expert on the practical aspects of Dolby Atmos. You may remember Dale from Episode 16 last year. Dal...

Send us Fan Mail Robin Eaton is a songwriter, musician, vocalist, and studio owner based in Nashville. I’ve known Robin for over 40 years, since he lived in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He came into my studio around 1980 to record demos for several songs and I was blown away by the quality of his compositions. In this informal and wide-ranging conversation, Robin talks about his early influences,...

Send us Fan Mail In the days before tape recording, records had to be made “live,” with the performance going directly to a master lacquer disc. In the 1950s, when recording to tape became possible, the mastering step could be detached from recording, but the performance was still captured live. When multitrack tape became universal in studios in the 1960, the concept of mixing after recording eme...

Send us Fan Mail In this short episode, I describe the process I went through on a recent recording project. We were recording a harpsichord, an instrument I had some experience recording, but never before as a solo instrument in the studio. Here is a link to a video made during the recording session. https://youtu.be/Kkg3m6Whydo  We were recording a Bach Fantasy and Fugue piece, played by George...

Send us Fan Mail Most of us record in studios of various types. But sometimes it is necessary, or advantageous, to record on location. I’ve had a studio most of my career, but in the early days, I recorded entirely on location. More recently, before I built my present studio, I did quite a few location recordings, in many types of venues. Some were concert halls, theaters, or sports arenas, but ma...

Send us Fan Mail Ever wonder how do vacuum tubes actually work? Tubes are one electronic device that you can actually see how they operate. I explain vacuum tube fundamentals in this conversation with Matthew Glosson. Matthew has been working for D.W. Fearn for the past year, mostly with Geoff Hazelrigg on the manufacturing side of the business. Recently he constructed some prototype circuits for...