Dave Goes To The Grammies

or:

Can Glitz ‘n Glamour Seduce Our Intrepid Audio Explorer? You Bet!

by Dave Moulton

Dave Gets Nominated!

Talk about a hoot! Out of the blue, a Grammy Nomination!

I suspect any of you reading this have had the same fantasy – you’re in the middle of a recording project, things are going really well for a change, and all of a sudden you have this flash. “You know,” murmurs a little voice in the back of your mind, “this could be Grammy Material.” Grammy Material! Makes you giddy, eh?

I’ve had the fantasy any number of times, of course, just like you. But most of my work is really way outside of the realm of NARAS’ interests. There is no category for “Best Audio Ear Training Drill Set.” So, when I found out that I’d been nominated for a Grammy, I was floored.

I was nominated along with my friend and colleague Curt Wittig. It was his gig, but we’ve shared jobs over the years and I’d worked with him, George Crumb and Orchestra 2001 before. This album, “George Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children” (CRI 803) was recorded in 1997 and ’98. The album was released in December, 1998, I think, and that was the last I thought about it. A nice gig, good for the portfolio. Great music, great players, great hall. Decent equipment. What more could you ask for? Fame? Fortune? Don’t be silly!

I was at a Members’ Dinner of the American Loudspeaker Manufacturers Association in Las Vegas when they told me. I thought it was a joke, somebody pulling my leg. Somebody across the table, from Polk Audio, I think, said, “No, it’s true. You were nominated for a Grammy this morning.” The adrenalin kicked in and I sprayed dark Brazilian beer all over the nice white linen tablecloth!

Later that night, I logged on to Grammy.com to see it for myself: “Category 84: Best Engineered Album, Classical. George Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children, et al. David Moulton & Curt Wittig, engineers.” Like I said, makes you giddy! Summmmmbich!

Dave Goes To The Grammies

“The Grammies” is actually a week-long hooplathon, culminating in “Music’s Greatest Night,” a.k.a. “The Telecast.” We skipped the “Classical Luncheon,” the “Elton John: Person of the Year” luncheon and the Grammies in the Schools Day. These are serious fund-raisers, costing $500 a plate and up (S10,000 a table, if I recall, for the Elton John bash) – not for ordinary mortals. However, nominees DO each get one free ticket to The Telecast and can buy one more as well (my wife Carol Bousquet’s view-obstructed seat cost $400!). We also got to go to the Nominees Reception and to the post-Grammy party at the Regal Biltmore. The Grammies are an expensive business!

So what was it REALLY like? The Telecast is the least of it. The night before, there was a Nominees Reception held at the California Science Center, at which Lifetime Achievement awards were given out. This was quite a moving ceremony, and we four (my wife Carol and I, Curt and CRI Director Jody Dalton) felt honored to be there.

Bill Putnam (founder of UREI) got a Technical Grammy, as did AMS Neve Consoles. Phil Spector and Clive Davis got Trustees Awards. Lifetime Achievement Awards went to Woody Guthrie, John Lee Hooker, Willie Nelson, Mitch Miller, and Harry Belafonte, certainly a stellar and deserving lot. In his acceptance speech, Harry Belafonte described his experiences working in the civil rights movement. “After my substantial early success, I was angered to discover that I was not welcome at the table of plenty that was America in the 1950s, due to the color of my skin. I decided to resist that,” he began, and went on to describe his work with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and others. It transcended the hype, and he got a richly deserved standing ovation.

After the awards, we all got to pick up neat little Tiffany medallions. You have to sign for them, and when they opened the book to the M’s for me, there, listed at the top of my page, was Alanis Morisette and at the bottom, Ann Sophie Mutter, with a lot of household names in between – a helluva list to be on! I asked them if I could get a photocopy, once everybody’d signed for their medallions. They smiled, politely. Right.

Grammy Day! Rain! Carol, who’s really good at this, was the perfect Grammy person, rain or shine. Dressed to the nines, she cut a royal swath through the hotel lobby, onto the bus, to the Staples Center through the pouring rain and onto famous Red Carpet, getting high-fives from everyone from the concierge to the video guys looking for stars. She really made the whole thing into magic! I trailed along in my tux, yet another penguin, happy just to be there!

This was for the so-called Pre-Telecast Ceremony. This is the real Grammies, of course. No production numbers, no songs, dances or FX, just serious if immensely fun business. We all sat down front. Carlos Santana was about six rows in front of us, B. B. King was about five rows back and on the other side. Wayne Shorter was around, as was Tony Bennett!

David Foster did the honors, with LeVar Burton, Emmylou Harris, Lalo Schifrin, and Stevie Vai handing out awards. Our category came up fifth, which was merciful. I had handicapped us at 3:1, while Carol was convinced we’d win. Not our day. Markus Heiland won for a three CD release on RCA of the San Francisco Symphony playing Stravinsky. Definitely their day, as they won in three categories. Nice going!

Oh, well. Curt and I shook hands, and we all sat back to enjoy the rest of the show. Too many categories to remember, much less comment on. It was nice to see Wayne Shorter honored, also Gary Burton. Carlos Santana, meanwhile, was raking ‘em in. A very popular winner, he was gracious, eloquent and funny. It was a very pleasurable ceremony.

They shooed us out to re-set for The Telecast. The Staples Center, being a sports arena, had beer and pretzels available, plus some really cheap, if expensive, wine. The Telecast itself seemed more like a surreal circus than a concert or awards ceremony. The sturm und drang dried up for three minutes out of every nine, and we’d all sit around chatting in the semi-dark, pointing out the stray celebrity on his/her way to/from the bar/john. The stage director would yell over the PA, “Rosie, 60 seconds to air,” and Rosie O’Donnell would start telling raunchy jokes, smoothly cutting to the Teleprompter script just as we rolled back into America’s Living Rooms. Being there wasn’t very enriching, culturally. The sound was not very good and was also way too loud (I estimate a sustained 100-105 dB SPL where we were sitting, back in row ZZG). Without ear-plugs, it was physically painful as well as inappropriate

The Telecast was long on FX, short on substance. High points for me were Sting’s performance, Elton John with the Backstreet Boys, Joshua Bell and the string band, plus the kids’ fifteen seconds of fame. A media event. Not really Music’s Greatest Night, but, hey, that’s Network TeeVee!!

Dave Goes To The Party!

The Party!

Here’s the scene: NARAS booked the entire Regal Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. Six banquet rooms each with its own band, plus a Zydeco band out on the street! And these bands were ON FIRE – it was smokin’ at the Biltmore! Among the bands were Asleep At The Wheel, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, the Dave Weckl Band and the Pete Escovedo Orchestra. An embarrassment of riches!

We caught a set of Eric Burdon and The New Animals, and it was simply the best club rock ‘n roll I have ever heard! After I changed the batteries in my pacemaker, we went downstairs into the Biltmore Bowl and caught a Latin Jazz set with Pete Escovedo. This is your basic mainline Latin Jazz Big Band, with six horns and full rhythm, and they were simply incandescent!

Sorry I can’t tell you more. We had to quit while we were ahead, or die! Next year, I’ll join the Academy just so I can go to the party again. This part of it may be Music’s Greatest Night, after all. Thanks, NARAS!

The bottom line is, the immense feeling of validation you get from the nomination simply takes your breath away. It is surprisingly gratifying, and means much, much more in fact than I ever would have imagined. I sincerely hope that all of you can have the experience some time!

Sidebar: So What Went Into Our Grammy Material Recording?

Our recording was made at Lang Concert Hall, a smallish concert hall at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia. We could only record when the college was out of session, due to noise issues, and we still lost lots of takes due to aircraft and truck noise. We recorded in 6-channel surround format. All told, we recorded twelve mic channels, but ended up only using six.

We set up a nearby rehearsal room as a control room, using a combination of Genelec 1030A's for the front monitors and the overhead and Paradigm Mini Mark IIIs for the surround monitors. Placement and level management was comparatively casual.

We used four API mic preamps, plus stock Yamaha 03D preamps and a Symmetrix. We ran it all through Curt’s Yamaha 03D and recorded at 16-bit 44.1 kHz. resolution to two Tascam DA-38s. No signal processing of any sort. Nothing fancy.

The primary ingredient in our success, as far as I’m concerned, was our use of a pair of Soundfield ST-250 stereo mics for a “Double-MS” array (one stereo mic placed comparatively close to the ensemble, the other just beyond the critical distance in the hall and facing backwards into the hall to record room sound). We used my elderly Schoeps tube mic for a discrete center mic that was roughly coincident with the front Soundfield, an AKG 414 cardioid facing upward midway between the two Soundfields (for the overhead channel). The score of “Ancient Voices of Children” calls for an amplified grand piano that is used, with its damper pedal held down, as an “echo chamber” for the soprano to sing into. We used a pair of Neumann KM-84s inside this “echo” piano, to augment the amplified sound of the echoing piano strings. This was tough sledding, took some serious futzing, but ended up really sounding magical.

We also recorded Left/Right outrigger channels with a matched pair of Audio-Technica 4050s and Left/Right spaced omni channels (Earthworks) for surround, just in case we needed them. We didn’t.

As is typical in classical recording, we recorded tons of takes, and Curt had lots of fun editing – I suspect there are probably several hundred edits across the CD.

In post-production, we did no EQ or mixing, just five of the six discrete channels encoded to Circle Surround,® which is a matrix-surround scheme similar to Dolby Pro Logic but more oriented to music production. The resulting 2-channel master can be played in either stereo or through a Circle Surround® (or Dolby Pro Logic or other analog matrix) decoder. For what it’s worth, our recording was the only surround release nominated.

We ended up doing some significant compression on the recording, and there's an interesting story there. For this sort of work, I’m normally leery of compression, as the dynamics are an integral expressive element in the music, and this is especially true for George Crumb’s music. When I did a Noise level Analysis of the edited recording, I discovered that our dynamic range was greater than 72 dB, which in turn is 10 dB greater than the most dynamic commercially released classical recording I’ve ever measured. So, I was more than a little concerned that the recording would be a little, er, too dynamic for normal playback. Definitely unlistenable in a car, for instance.

During playbacks, the conductor Jim Freeman complained that he couldn’t hear the soft stuff and that the loud stuff hurt!. Believe it or not, he actually asked for compression! This is a first in my experience - a classical conductor actually asking for the dynamic range of a recording to be reduced! So, we did, compressing the dynamic range to about 60 dB, still 20 dB greater than most classical recordings I’ve measured.

So that’s how we did it. Modest means, except for some really good mics, great players, music and hall. And the proof is in the pudding! There’s a lesson in there somewhere. For all our agonizing over gear, mostly it’s quite good enough for a Grammy. Really good mics and really good speakers are probably the most important things. After, of course, your ears, your craft and your experience.

Dave Moulton is having fun in Groton, MA.