TWO RECORDING LAYOUTS THAT RELY HEAVILY ON LOCAL ACOUSTICS

For the "No Paranoïa" project (1999-2002).

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

The "No Paranoïa" project consists in ca. fourteen pieces, mostly written by Christophe Monniot & I, some with Denis Charolles, and a few with Pierre-Yves Macé. They were recorded and produced in Paris between 1999 and 2002.

As different as some of those pieces may be from some others, they were all made with similar production methods. There are two kinds of trakcs: the solo pieces (saxophone only) and the collective pieces ( with mainly drums, along with sometimes other instruments such as bass guitar or trombone ).

Basically, most pieces were recorded in what some people might call weird conditions : in extremely reverberant places, in corridors... one was even recorded in a bathroom. Some solo pieces were recorded in normal studios, with only the direct sound and a multieffect. Various microphones were used, preferably in devious ways.

With only one exception, all the pieces have been heavily edited afterwards, mainly using ProTools, and sometimes a Sonic Solution station. Generally, everything has been drastically processed, using all kinds of machines : several sorts of reverbs, several sorts of compressors, distortion from every machine at hand... etc.

POST PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

---- EXAMPLE 1

Let's start with the only piece which was not edited, which consists in a saxophone like hand made instrument solo, the corresponding recording layout being the example 2 from above.

There are three mike sets : close, medium and far.
The close set is taken as a reference. It is compressed and slightly EQed.
Using different settings, the medium set is compressed also, as well as differently EQed and then routed into a reverb.
Basically, the mix consists in a panned superposition of the close set, the reverberated medium set and the dry medium set.
Those three layers are panned in a way that the resulting stereo image is slightly but constantly moving.
The far set is used very lightly on top of this.

Here is an extract from the concerned piece.

--- EXAMPLE 2

Two other pieces were recorded in the same place a few moments later, this time with the trombone as well, and this time strongly edited.
For those two pieces, the post production method was entirely different.

Several "pre mixes" of a given part of the recording were done. Those mixes were all sounding different.
Then the mixes are edited together, the timbre following the music.
Then the whole thing is more drastically edited, possibly enhancing strongly the original content, possibly going in a completely different direction. For those two pieces, the editing was mainly made "cut". No superpositions, only a few fades, just pieces of mixes following one another.
Eventually, you've got a distinctive "object" made of sound and music. It's a kind of a strongly distorted, and possibly imaginary, reality.

Click here for an extract from one of the pieces.

--- EXAMPLE 3

In some cases also, especially during the making of the latest pieces, the recording is considered as a sound library, and the actual structure is made during the post production.

Click here for an example of one of those.