The Absolute Sound‘s Andrew Quint takes you behind the scenes of the Hermitage Piano Trio’s recording sessions at Mechanics Hall:
At 7 p.m. on Labor Day, I was sitting at a table in the empty lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn in Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting to speak with Reference Recordings engineer Keith O. Johnson. Across from me was RR’s public relations director, Janice Mancuso. She’d promised to produce “Professor” Johnson at six-thirty, but after 27 years at her job, Mancuso knew better. The Reference team had access at Mechanics Hall a few blocks away until seven and was using every last second on this, their first day of recording an all-Rachmaninov program with the Hermitage Piano Trio. A few minutes after the hour, Mancuso’s phone chimed. She turned the screen in my direction to show me a two-word message from Reference’s Vice President of Operations JoAnn Nunes: “Herding cats.”
Moments later, the doors to the hotel lobby slid open and in walked the felines in question, including Johnson, Nunes, digital engineer Sean Royce Martin, and producers Victor and Marina Ledin. (Executive and Managing Director Marcia Martin was back in San Francisco minding the store.) Keith Johnson is now close to 80, but if he was the least bit worn out from ten hours of set-up and recording, it wasn’t obvious; in fact, he seemed energized. Johnson has worked in Mechanics Hall previously—the Renaissance Revival-style building, constructed in the 1850s and restored in 1977, is a favorite recording site for labels big and small. Asked to describe the sound of Mechanics Hall, Johnson characteristically begins his answer with a subjective impression that progressively becomes more specific and quantitative. “It has a glow, an aura, a solidity that can have a lot of power. You can clearly tell the walls are heavy. It has a ‘tail,’ and a tail is a very, very important part of the concert experience. Say, on piano, you play a note loud. The string vibrates to the limit and vibrates a little faster—so the note has a slightly higher pitch than it would have if it were played softly. The fundamental and harmonics drive the hall hard and this little tail happens, which is probably two or three times longer than the main hall reverb. As the note decays, you have two slightly different frequencies going. It creates what’s called a “sublime harmony” effect—it was described originally, I think, for music boxes. It’s a little undulation of sound that kind of floats. Pianos are particularly good at it; some woodwinds and other instruments that are overblown do the same thing. It’s part of what Mechanics Hall does very well.”
The following morning I headed over to the hall to observe the second of three days of recording. The large room was devoid of any seating on the main floor—the space can be used for weddings and exhibitions as well as concerts, and the chairs are removable. Onstage, a variety of microphones, mostly vintage Sennheisers rebuilt by Keith Johnson, are mounted on stands. (The exception is a pair of Coles 4038 dynamic ribbon mics, positioned in front of the piano.) “I have a direct-to-two-channel setup, which is how we’ve done most of our recordings. It kind of resembles a Decca tree, except that the center is a stereo microphone, not a mono. I will very likely have two sets of outriggers instead of one. Almost always, there will be a set of hall microphones that will tie it together. And these days, I use head-related transfer function EQ.” Johnson continues: “I’m recording for three different formats. Surround is certainly one of them. Two-channel for loudspeakers and two-channel for headphones—they are not the same thing. I feel very strongly that the industry has to adapt because I can do my best work knowing ‘OK, this one’s for playback in a living room setting’—and I can do things that, for headphones, would be very bad, bass in one ear, for instance. Binaural headphones, on the other hand, can create a very immersive experience.”
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