Boston Section

October's meeting was on field and location recording, a side of the industry that is encountered by the public more often than any other aspect of the business, with the possible exception of sound reinforcement. However, in spite of its wide exposure, it doesn't carry the same glamour as the rest of our field - when most people think of recording, they think of an engineer sitting behind a giant console in a studio somewhere mixing the latest album or film score, rather than a guy on the street or on a set with a shotgun mic and a recorder over his shoulder.

A possible reason for the lowered stature of field recording is the fact that the equipment tends to be smaller and more portable - it's awfully tough to carry a 96-channel SSL console with you to a film shoot - and as a result, it can look the same as a lot of prosumer gear. For example, Marantz, a company known both for its professional and consumer-level equipment, makes four widely different portable recorders: the PMD-430 stereo cassette recorder, the PMD-650 minidisc recorder, the PMD-690 solid state recorder, and the CDR-300 CD recorder all of which are built on the same form-factor and from a distance look the exact same. Additionally, in the broadcast industry, we frequently send our reporters out with Sony portable minidisc recorders (the same ones that you can find at Circuit City or Best Buy).

When you get right down to it, the public sees us with the same or similar gear to what they use to record their son's birthday party and we get inevitably compared to amateurs.

This is not a situation found only in location recording; with inexpensive (yet still powerful) PC workstations and editing programs, such as ProTools LE, SoundForge, and a host of looping programs for 'home DJs,' small studios and project studios that don't have those 96-channel consoles are starting to hear from the public, "what can you do that I can't do?"

The added value of our services is not in just the equipment we use, but in our skill, training, and experience. Though we may be using some of the same tools, we have the talents to use them in better ways, with more precision and efficiency, and can better harness the creativity of our clients and ourselves.

This 'value added' concept applies not just to field and location recording, but also to all aspects of our industry as well as any other service-based profession.

To illuminate some of the ways that their experience and skill has aided them in the past, we had a large panel of guests from several diverse sides of field recording:

• Herbie Robinson runs Curbside Recording, a 24-track mobile recording studio in a truck that can pull up to wherever the client needs. With a degree in electronics and more than twenty years of experience recording, he can not only build his own custom gear but also utilize it in ways that will best achieve his clients' visions.
• Geoff Steadman likewise has been in the broadcast and audio industry for two decades, and has served both as a director of live recording for WBUR and a product and sales manager for Harman's Orban division, instrumental in developing the DSE 7000 and Audicy digital editing workstations. An independent engineer and producer, he specializes in live classical recording.
• George Hicks has been at WBUR for the past five years, currently as technical director and producer for WBUR's "Inside Out," airing 13 hour-long radio documentaries in the last two years on over 100 stations. Prior to serving at WBUR, George ran a live sound company, has been a staff engineer at a 24-track analog facility, and served as a freelance engineer and producer specializing in live-to-2 track recording.
• Spencer Love runs Love Song Productions , a music publisher focusing primarily on live filk recording at a large number of festivals. He also branches out the live recording side of his operation to include corporate demos and business meetings.
• Mark Donahue and Blanton Alspaugh have served for several years as staff engineers at Soundmirror, covering everything from location recording, editing, mixing, and mastering.

The meeting progressed in a round-table discussion format, discussing different parts of what we as engineers bring to the table for our clients, whether it's custom cables and snakes (as Soundmirror does, having learned to not rely on generic manufacturer's cables for mission-critical installations), or the experience and ability to know the exact right place in the concert hall to place mics to best effect. Some of the other issues that were brought up were discussions of quality vs. storage - as in the (admittedly expensive) case of 24-bit, 96 kHz direct to hard drive recording as opposed to fitting 2 hours in mono on a single minidisc; and the necessity of knowing not just your own setup, but the rest of the building's, as in the case of a classical recording session done by Soundmirror that was plagued by intermittent hums and buzzes on the (supposedly isolated) control room electrical feed - which turned out to be caused by an electrician who put three photocopiers on the same circuit.

Finally, the evening finished up trading war stories - experience being possibly the most important thing we can provide for our clients - including a story from Mark and Blanton of a gear-laden truck that was stolen from the loading dock of a venue in New York later recovered by the police, but only after the thieves had dumped all of the cases out of the back of the truck and left them lying by the side of the road in the middle of the Bronx.

Thanks go to all of our panelists, as well as several of the attending members who stepped up with their own stories and experiences. Learning more about what can (and probably will) go wrong can only make us more valuable, and having the knowledge and ability to counter mistakes before they happen and provide a perfect product and service to our clients is where our 'added value' truly comes from.

-Dan Rose is studio maintenance engineer and chief operator at WBUR, and has ten years of experience in sound reinforcement and recording with companies from Don Law to Capron Lighting & Sound.