Chet Question about his Gretsch Recorded Direct

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Re: Chet Question about his Gretsch Recorded Direct

Postby thenorm » Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:19 pm

His grandson once told me that Chet's studio was pretty well soundproofed and no extra percautions needed to be taken by family members upstairs when he was in the basememt recording. He said it was not easy to hear him elsewhere in the house. More like through the airducts rather than through the floor.

Apparently it wasn't all that distracting. Chet was never about Loud.

Recording direct give you more presence and better equalization control but what I've gathered from Paul's posts was that after he got his '59 Chet preferred to use the Standel and mic combitation.

Probably gives a warmer sound... Something to be said about room ambiance that going direct just can't deliver...
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Re: Chet Question about his Gretsch Recorded Direct

Postby RandeDager » Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:41 pm

Norm, this is interesting to me. Can't "warmth" be digitally reproduced?
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Re: Chet Question about his Gretsch Recorded Direct

Postby thenorm » Tue Jun 07, 2011 10:53 pm

Rande they've tried for years to "improve' things digitally.

I've had to live with a congenital hearing loss my whole life so I can't cite personal experience but I know I have read about people complaining about the "digital remastering" that somehow sucks the warmth out of things tha were originally recorded by analog methods. There are some going back to listening to their music on vinly in spite of its clicks and pops because it jus Sounds Better.

Even some of the modern groups are going back to the old style 'everybody in the same room on the same day recording the same song' method that worked so well frome 1955 to the late sixties.

The method of taking months to create an album a track at a time may give you a "perfect product" but it's the interaction between living musicians that adds a certain 'something' to a recording that all the knobs and battery powered boxes or stacked heads can touch.

That is what I've been reading now for years, gentlemen...
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Re: Chet Question about his Gretsch Recorded Direct

Postby rgervais » Tue Jun 07, 2011 11:47 pm

Good point about digital vs analog. The way I have always thought of it is like a b&w photo in the newspaper. From a distance it looks ok, but when you look up close, you see it is made up of tiny dots with space between them. I think of digital sound that way. The digital sound is the dots...the space between the dots is "warmth" or "soul" that is lost when the continuous analog signal is converted to a digital signal. The increases in sample rates add resolution, the dots get smaller with less space between them, but still not the same. Others will say you can't hear the difference, but who knows, maybe you simply feel it on some other level.

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Re: Chet Question about his Gretsch Recorded Direct

Postby Terry Tolley » Wed Jun 08, 2011 12:13 am

The analogy of the photo dots with spaces between them is a sterling example of what is known as quantization error in the digital world. I once had a problem where it was desired to accurately measure a 1000 Hz signal and its 2nd and 3rd harmonics, along with any noise. The problem came with my clock speed on the sampling circuit. In order to get usable resolution (low quantization error) I had to measure at a rate that is 10 times higher than my highest frequency. This means I can sample 10 points on my waveform and store the value. For audio resolution to be faithful to the ear, one must go way beyond 10 times the frequency. This is not always practical, and it is certainly not cheap!! Analog to digital converters and their counterparts - digital to analog converters use averaging to achieve reasonable values. Discerning ears can easily tell the difference, and the results are easily seen on an oscilloscope. I found out that going digital is not easy, and one had to carefully choose the point at which the conversion was made so as not to break the development bank.
These days - 10-bit converters are relatively cheap, so a very workable solution comes by using multiple converters in a cascade fashion. Even so....quantization errors are there in both directions, and they can definitely be heard by the trained ear. Not mine...to be sure....but they CAN be heard. Sorry to be so long winded, but the argument about digital versus analog is definitely a valid one!!
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