En lydtekniker forteller om da han var med på en innspilling med Sinatra. (Jeg har uthevd).
My 30 Minutes With Sinatra: The Saddest Thing of All | Dr. Glenn Berger PhD, Psychotherapist – The Blog
Sinatra said, “I’ll run it down for you one time so you can set levels.”Rich hit the talk back, and said, “Great.”I hit play and record. I had learned by now that you record everything, from the first take. You never know when the magic will hit, and even though he said this would be a run-through, if he asked afterwards if we recorded, we’d want to say yes.
Watching the meters and Blakin’s hand, we were both astonished. Sinatra was able to increase his volume and intensity, while the needle hardly moved. How could he do that?With most singers, one needed to be deft with the “pot” or potentiometer, the knob with which we controlled the recording volume. If the singer got loud, you needed to turn the knob down so the tape wouldn’t be saturated and you’d get distortion. If the singer got too soft, you needed to turn the knob up, so the signal on tape would not be too scant, and buried in the floor-level of noise that was on all analog recording tape. If we did not trust our hands to do the job well enough, we would patch in that technical device called a limiter, or a compressor, which electrically narrowed a signal’s dynamic range. This device would lower the highest volumes and, in the case of the compressor, increase the lowest ones. But with Sinatra, Blakin barely needed to nudge the dial at all.We watched Sinatra to figure out how he did it. Listening to his own vocals through the headphones, he carefully and subtly moved toward the mic during the softer passages and moved away from the mic during the louder parts. He “rode” his own levels, by how close or far he was from the microphone. In this way, his intensity would increase, but the recording volume stayed within the narrow range that the equipment liked best. This is called good mic technique, and I’ve never seen anyone use it as effectively as Frank.Watching Sinatra sing, I thought about what he meant in the history of music. There were many factors, I mused, about what made him such a phenomenon, but now I realized that one of them was how he used recordings and the microphone.Until just a few years before Sinatra, most singers learned, as central to their technique, projection. They needed to be able to be heard without amplification by a large audience. That’s what singing was. There were no mics, amplifiers, sound systems, or recordings.You can hear what I mean by listening to opera. That kind of singing seems so false to us today, but at the time it was what was necessary to reach the back row of the great concert halls so everyone could hear the words over the clangorous orchestra.
