The sky's the limit in the recording studio ,or not ?

Uilleann Pipes
1

I wouldn’t be too aware of whats out there regarding home recording equipment but I know things have certainly advanced a lot in the last ten years or so and of course with a professional recording studio there are no barriers as to what you can do.
So with that in mind how far should a piper making a solo take it ? Its common knowledge that pipers in the past would add drones and some regulator playing after the chanter playing has been recorded but I’m not aware of any recording where this has been taken any further than what the piper could play anyway.
Apart from pitch correcting and editing out bum notes , would you like to hear tasteful regulator playing along with the tune that would not be possible to perform live or things like double tracking chanter playing to add counterpoint. How about ,in one track having the drones change pitch to suit key changes ,if fact with some imagination the possibilities are endless .

RORY

2

I think as an in joke for those who know what’s happening it can be fine, but I wouldn’t go down the route of trying to be a serious musician with it. If your art is trying to have you do things the instrument can’t you should take up an instrument that can keep up with you. But just having the drones slide up to a key change could be amusing…ONCE.

Someone did this on an old SSP track, splicing together A and D smallpipes to play a tune with a large range on it. Hering it for the first time makes you scratch your head, until he tips the wink by playing a throw on D on high A. Can’t remember who but it was certainly clever.

3

An interesting question. If it makes the music better and “good” music is the only thing that matters when forming an opinion, then yes, it’s great. But, doing complicated regulator stuff on a separate track that the piper cannot do while playing the chanter is also faking and might make people think the piper is better than he/she is in reality, so in that sense it’s bad. If only the outcome and musical imagination matter, then I think it’s perfectly OK to reach the goal with studio tricks.

4

I like listening to music that sounds good.

I can think of two nifty studio things that I’ve heard, both done by EJ Jones.

I have a CD where he plays a tune on both a Scottish Small Pipe and also a Highland pipe. One is panned hard left and the other hard right. It sounds really cool. I listened to it for about a week before I noticed what he had done.

The other is where he strikes in his drones through a chord change. It sounds wicked cool. I suppose that’s not really a studio trick though, because he could do that live.

No one is too upset when singers overdub harmonies, or guitar players overdub solos.

5

there’s some doubling up on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjCotOGlxYU

also, on black black black (the tune from the cran album with the same name) ronan browne overdubs regulators

6

ronan makes a point of having it stated that the regs were recorded separately just in case anyone were to think he was able to perform miracles I suppose

7

as far as their kickstarter campaign, credit cards, 401k, and home equity loan can take them. Selling some family heirlooms could help also. Studio time can add up real fast.

PS: I wouldnt care if that piper dont have the cred & skills to do it live. if its an awesome, edgy, mind-blowing project that truly pushes boundaries & challenges my conception of what ITM and an uilleann pipe is, I;m buyin it. :thumbsup:

8

It was a big moment for me when I listened to the last track on Na keen affair with headphones on some months ago and I realized that the regs in Rakish Paddy must have been added afterwards because they are panned very differently compared to the chanter and drones and neither leak at all on the regs track. A part of me died with that realization :wink: I always thought that it was all played live.

9

The realities of a recording studio bite quite quickly. Flaws that you are willing to put up with live become simply unacceptable when you hear them through the monitors.

There’s a distinction to be made between things that could be done live if you had another musician or whatever, and things that are simply physically impossible. The latter, I think, should be treated with caution. Of course if it creates something worth hearing, all well and good, but for the most part gimmicks are a dead end.

10

Micky Cumbaw O’Sullivan, one of the first pipers ever recorded, was appalled when the Edison Cylinder was played back to him… O’Neill says " Evidently regarding this as another instance of the devil’s handiwork, he aimed several whacks of his cane at the enchanted box before he could be restrained".

Now, in reality was O’sullivan upset by the quailty of his performance or perhaps he thought the machine had stolen his music or his Soul ( as many Aboriginal peoples thought when seeing their photo portrait)…??

If much studio work is used to manipulate the performance, add double tracks etc… could that be construde as interfering with the Soul of the Instrument?

I prefer to listen to the un-clean sounds…

11

:laughing: well Rory, ten posts ( not counting this one) to expose yet another unbridgable divide. You really should try harder, man. :laughing: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :heart:

12

But just because it was recorded that way (assuming it was) doesn’t mean he can’t play it live. They might have recorded it that way just to be able to isolate the regs in the mix. Or maybe to be able to tune them in the box. I heard him say that he didn’t think any UP were ever really completely in tune.

13

Me too.


I’m more of a pure drop fellow, but if it sounds good and people like it, who am I to stop them? :slight_smile:



P.S: I’d love to do a recording and make an album someday. Anybody hear done it?

Maybe when I have some sort of Mid-Life Crisis…

14

I have not made an album.

But I’ve done some home recording and some live sound and both are a lot of work. Steep learning curve not unlike learning a musical instrument.

15

I’ve done lots of recordings over the years so I have a bit of an insight.

I admit I have recorded just chanter and regulators and then added drones to tracks at a later time.
That was due to laziness and not having the drones balanced properly on the day.
I’ve though of adding regulators separately but I thought it would feel natural. I may not have picked the same chords that I would have had if I was playing naturally and ‘in the zone’. And if someone was to expect you to play the same thing live you’d look a bit silly when failing.

Regarding fixing bum notes and squeaks digitally, it can be done but it’s very slow and painstaking. You have to expand the wave file on a screen, find the right bleep, cut it out. Then play the clip again, make adjustments and so on till it sounds clean and in time. Then you have to go through the tune and find a suitable note to fill the gap. It could take at least 30 minutes to do that. Paying studio time and engineers gets expensive so it would be faster and just better to record more takes till everyone is happy with the recording. Or just cancel the session and come back another day without the boxing gloves!

Although I know of one prominent piper who, on an album most of us have, recorded the 3 drones individually and the engineer asked what it would be like just to use the bass drone. They tried it and liked it and it’s on the album. I would never have spotted it listening to the record unless the engineer told me himself.

Tommy

16

Could money be saved by doing it all in one take/sitting?



What’s the album where the piper players with the three drones separately?

17

I think there is a few issues that could be considered in relation to this topic. One that comes to light in some posts is , in what way do you think of Uilleann pipes as an instrument. Some pipers seem to think of pipes as some kind of crude unsophisticated beast that is only good for playing ITM and if that the way you think of them that’s all there will ever be. But I think the likes of Brian McNamara and Liam O’Flynn have shown that they potentially could be a lot more and could be used to play highly refined art music to the level of other instruments.
Another point is when a piper decides to make a solo album ,who is his target audience . If it is just other pipers ,which seems to be the case with most piping albums ,the piper is straight away putting limits on the amount of albums that will be sold. Before the first note is recorded you have to decide what is more important the quality of the music or the quality of the piping.
I would love to hear some piper with a lot of musically ability and imagination get together with a good producer or studio engineer and use both the pipes and the studio to their full potential. Maybe not so much dance music but maybe O’Carolan or even some classical stuff. For the long term well being of the instrument it could only help.

It wouldn’t be much fun to discuss something we all agreed on, would it?

RORY

18

Pipes , all pipes, are curious in that they straddle ‘Folk’& ‘Art’ music, im sure we’ve beaten this topic down in years past. For me, Uilleann have a right to keep a firm foot in both worlds. as they are just SO versatile, yet fluent in their own language par none.

Minority for sure. Even the most hidebound of highland piper’s ive met have a certain respect for Uilleann.

Refraction of the "studio trix or no’ aspect…most pipers seem to prefer the unadulterated version, most non pipers, i suspect, would like a back beat, cool echoey stuff, synthe pads under a soaring melody that breaks in to a reel or jig (cue bodhran @ 0:02:31:42).

Solo pipe, solo pipe w/full trad backing will sell to pipers & hardcore folkies,
‘The treatment’ will sell to the average collegiate and culture vulture looking for a quikie Celtic fix. Its where the money is, such as it is.

& You never diassapoint! :smiley:

The Robert Johnson approach. Sure! theres your pure drop CD right there. It’d be a long night though- mic setup thru to mastering.. & better get them all down in one take. Possible i suppose.

FWIW, & IMHO…all the recordings done as such that ive heard strongly smell of ‘ethnomusicological-thesis’ …recording this ‘lost art’ for ‘posterity’…

19

It may not be exactly this, but have you heard the new Tunes from the Goodman Manuscripts CD by Mick O’Brien, Emer Mayock, Aoife Ni Bhriain? The prodcution and studio engineering are both top-notch, a cut far above most of the recorded ITM in my collection (FWIW, I do have experience in studio recording albeit in other genres to base my opinions on). A gorgeous recording, and a lot of it is not dance music either. In my opinion, it sets a new standard for recording traditional instruments.

20

I’ve done a load of studio work too and it’s amazing what they’ll do, what they can do.

For example they can go in and alter the pitch of any note.

So on my chanter high E is bang-on but low E is a bit sharp and I’m used to ‘shading’ that note to bring it down.

I’ve done gigs where one section of the piece only has low E’s so I can put a piece of tape on that note to make it right in tune. Of course it makes high E really flat! But if there’s no high E’s in that portion who’s to know?

Or one time where I just went ahead and let low E be sharp and did all the normal ornaments on it. They went back and brought the low E’s down to pitch… it’s easy, you just drag the mouse over the note and drag it down to the pitch you want. (Other than that recording, my work isn’t ‘corrected’ pitchwise, because I play in tune. One studio had me hear my raw recording and the same thing run with ‘auto-tune’ and the auto-tune version sounded sterile and plastic-y. They don’t like using auto-tune if they can help it, for that reason.)

I’ve done things where they want the chanter in a different key so I just play the piece in the key it fits best on the pipes and they move it. Or on one thing where I played the piece twice in G and they bumped up the second playing to A.

Recording the drones separately is always best: they can put the drones in wherever they want, or change the pitch of the drones to a different note if they want.

I did one thing where I played The Kesh Jig on the chanter only, then recorded the regs doing hand chords that would have been impossible to do while playing the chanter.

On one movie the composer had me just improvise over and over, and later he edited it to create the thing he wanted. (The edit is pretty obvious)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us5s01joupg

On one album they had me play anything… I played Silver Spear… and they edited it to fragments that popped in and out at various times (a rap album).

On one album they used the drones as a melody note, sort of, rather than a drone.