April 2022 - Wrap Up

I'm a little late this month with a wrap up as I have been busy with work over the last couple of days but here we are.

April has been a quite busy month for me, unfortunately however I can't talk about much of this yet but there will be more to talk about soon.

Over the last couple of weeks and months, I helped one of my patrons with his first orchestra recording from giving feedback on his music, going through several versions to traveling to Prague with him to assist on the session and lead the communication with the orchestra during the session.

We recorded one session with a quite large line-up at Smecky Studios with technically quite demanding music. It has now been more than 15 years since I recorded the first time in Prague and it is astounding how much the musicians have improved over the years. Every time I get there to record something that is technically a bit more demanding the level of musicianship is a bit better than before. This time was no exception. With other alternatives in Eastern Europe you often can feel lucky to get a take that is properly intonated and with correct timing. In this session in Prague, we barely had to deal with these things but actually could talk about interpretation and musical things which is when the fun actually starts. So I really think that the level of musicianship in Prague is really becoming competetive to more higher priced recording options.

However, Prague has the big issue of not having a good recording space for large orchestra. The line-up we recorded at Smecky was clearly not ideal for the room, we even ran out of headphones for a few musicians which is a clear sign that we're pushing the limits for this room. Smecky remains a quite small room with practically zero room reverb and this is something that you hardly can remove from the mix, no matter how much reverb you pour onto it. The brass dominate everything. The alternative location of the concert hall at Rudolfinum is the complete opposite with a huge reverb tail that becomes particularly problematic with busy rhythms. There are a few more studios in the city but none have a considerably bigger size than Smecky. So unfortunately the potential of the quality of the musicians can not be fully utilized.

So I spent the afternoon after the session to do some location scouting with Petr Pycha from Musa who is the booker and session coordinator I have been working with over the last couple of years. We visited a newly reconstructed theatre which has been used as a recording venue for a few smaller recordings over the last couple of months:

The big caveat in this location is the lack of inhouse recording infrastructure. So every mic, cable, percussion instrument, piano, music stand etc. needs to be rented and brought there. Additionally, it has a quite busy schedule where it is tricky to squeeze in.

The room seems great, I heard some snippets from the recordings there, there are a lot of absorbers on the walls so you hear the volume of the space but it's not drowning in reverb. It feels acoustically a lot like the scoring stages in LA rather than Abbey Road or Air. Still, they haven't recorded a big orchestra in this space yet, so it is a bit of a gamble of how the room will behave with 80+ musicians in it.

We're currently trying to calculate how much a recording would cost there as I'm planning a project which would highly benefit from a different room in Prague. There are still a few issues to be cleared whether this can be a viable alternative but it looks promising so far.

I will keep you updated on how this develops.

As usual, thank you for being part of this Patreon! I really appreciate your (continued) support and will do my best to keep providing relevant content. If you haven't done so far, consider joining our Discord server where we have a more direct interaction.

Robin