It seem as if more and more people are posting their "efforts" at self recording on the WWW. Most of the time the results are AWFUL and sound like the classical recording was done on an IPHONE (which in many cases might well have been how it was done). There are so many really great remote recording engineers in the world it would seem that these people should be able to find someone who would do a GREAT job and not charge them an arm and a leg to do it.

Or they could simply take some time to LEARN how to do a proper recording. Most of the time they are recording videos and audio at the same time. I can understand a parent recording their children's choir or orchestra on a cell phone or tablet but some of these recordings are of regional or local orchestras and ensembles. Are these groups hurting so much that they cannot afford a "proper recording"?

I know one of the groups we used to record has given up having their concerts professionally recorded and are encouraging their members to bring a cell phone or tablet to the concert if they want to have a memento of the event. Their reason for not wanting to hire someone is it "costs too much". This from a group who use to spend thousands of dollars on glossy printed programs for each of their concerts. GRRRRRR!

Anyway it seems to be a GROWING trend.

Hopefully it's not á global trend

"I used to care, but things have changed"

Bad recording but a great performance that I really really like:


Quality doesn´t matter for me here as in numerous other cases, too.

Heard via smartphone or boombox quality doesn´t matter that much anyway.

And I´m really glad that those guys uploaded some of their stuff!

I feel like the argument that mixes don´t matter since everyone listens to music via iphone very misleading.
I mean of course a great song is a great song and we were all happy recording these songs to tape from the tv or radio and we all enjoyed that anyways. Who cares about quality....but...
Later we got relatively poor sounding playback devices but it would still sound fine since good recorded albums sound ok/good on any device...

Today is different, you can really hear the mix of poor playback devices and poor mixing/recoding skills and it really sounds awful overall.
I can´t stand ppl listening to overcompressed garbage that gets fired via iphone speakers clipping the hell out of it for hours.
My ears bleed and I can´t stand it for like 30 seconds.

I can still listen to stuff produced in the 70/80s via iphone for some time but it´s because there are dynamics, quiet parts no hard clipping compression etc...

It makes a huge difference so the best way would be if everyone starts to use skilled AE´s again to give more value to their productions...
I mean WTF happened, I have colleagues doing mixes and masters for like 100€ ....
Stop drinking 8$ starbucks coffee everyday and put some love/passion into your song.
It´s not enough to put some ableton or Ozone preset on your terrible balanced mix without any pannings etc to make it a valuable piece of music IMO.

I am talking about recordings of regional or local symphonies done on an Iphone or IPad not someone's recording of an acapella group doing something in a room. People can record all they want of themselves and friends but when it comes to a professional or semi professional classical ensemble or solo artist then "please don't ruin it by having some amateur record it with their phone and posting it on the WWW"

That was my reason for posting this...

we have learned from psychology that it is extremely difficult to dissuade someone from harming themselves...

___


slightly off-topic (and yet related i think):

i was recently called to a broadcast to help a somewhat inexperienced technician with the setup: the task was to record a chamber orchestra and some speeches.

to make a long story short: there was an enormous difference between means and possibilities...

if the state radio of my country would be involved in such a project, a comfortably equipped OB van with all necessary (and excellent) equipment would be sent out with two technicians and a producer - in contrast to that, the poor guy was standing there with a cheap interface and four electret microphones of unknown design and a wireless microphone, the use of which has not been allowed here for years!

i asked him about his expenses and salary: he would have to contribute the equipment privately, organize the overnight stay himself, as well as food, travel (about 6 hours on the train) and would only be paid afterwards (after a few months/towards the end of the year) so he didn't dare to name a number...

in short: he got the job because he worked (more or less) for free - and this for a governmental client (not from a banana republic, but from a country in central-eastern europe)! i was angry at him and felt sorry for him at the same time... - anyway, i organized him a handful of schoeps, a remotely controlled preamp, a dm1000 and a madi interface, so he could make a recording according to the dignity of the occasion - he was extremely grateful and expressed the hope that this would also increase the chances that he would actually be paid!? he promised to send me a link which in never got though so i'm not sure the recording ever got aired...



bottom line: we're in deep trouble if not even some state broadcasters care about quality anymore (or are not willing to spend the necessary amount of money to enable decent quality in the first place)!

Yep no love for quality anymore....
One of the most commercial tv channels that produces the prime time stuff for decades in germany prefers to get a new team of audio guys from show to show since nobody is willing to work 70 hours a week for minimal wage ...but the young unexperienced guys do it anyways since
it´s soooooo good for their future portfolio...yada yada yada...
There is enough fresh blood in berlin to keep this going for decades I guess. better work for free than not working at all lol...weird mindset nowadays.

I play now, and have played in an orchestra much like what you describe. We've always had what I might call "dedicated amateurs" recording our concerts. There have been exceptions, though.

1.) Quite a few years ago now, over the span of about 6-7 years the orchestra recorded and released a series of 8 different CD's. The company at the time was Clarity Records, which no longer exists. The company was founded by the longtime "dedicated amateur" who basically decided to take a shot at "going pro". To my ears, the quality of the recordings is very good, though we are by no means a nationally recognized organization. They're sonically good, performance-wise "OK".

We stopped doing dedicated recordings because A.) they're exhausting for everybody....a full days solid work for the entire orchestra to record 75 minutes worth of music, and people got tired of it...and B.) we can't give the disks away!

2.) During the pandemic we had three "livestreams". Two were done by a professional audio company who brought an amazing array of audio and visual equipment to the job. The third was done by the semi-serious second trumpet player in the group, who recorded the audio, and the video was in fact a cellphone set up just outside the audio booth. Cold, hard truth was that the choke-point in the stream is "The Internet" and transmission speed. All three livestreams cut out, got out of sync and so on. The third one, done on the fly, was significantly better than the first two, for which we paid several thousand dollars out of a <$75,000 annual budget to hire "pros".

The Board, which is half musicians, half business/community members has hashed over the whole "recording" issue and come to the conclusion that it's just not worth spending the money on. What are we going to do with the recordings? Nobody will buy them, when professional, big-name orchestral recordings are available. If we do a world premiere (which we do, now and then), the only people who care are A.) the composer and B.) the orchestra members. Between the aforementioned 2nd trumpet player and his kit, and now (possibly....) me, we can produce recordings "good enough" to remind the players of the fun they had playing that new symphony or for slappping up on YouTube. They're not Good Enough for commercial release, but they're fine for the purpose intended.

I've always simplistically thought that this trend toward distasteful, ineptitude-laden audio just accentuates the contrast between what they're doing and what you're doing... like, a constant, inescapable reminder... and so is a good thing, something you would maybe label as "negative advertising"???

Sure, it's a sad sight to see people destroying themselves and ruining everything... I guess... but my interests are so well served, I sure would be a fool to cry.

BTW, I recently performed and recorded the Bernard Herrmann Clarinet Quintet with a string quartet of friends. We rehearsed in the violists house and once in my house. When it came time to record the piece, I insisted on recording it in my house because the violists home, while lovely, is sonically very "dead". My house is no auditorium but it's better than her place. Anyway, please understand that the players in the group are all amateurs, but they are very serious amateurs with decades of chamber music and orchestra playing behind them. Two still study with some of the best cello/violin teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Truth....I recorded the first rehearsal on a Blue Yeti USB microphone in omni mode, direct into Audacity on my MacBook. The first violinist recorded a substantial part of the first movement on his Android phone. Everyone in the group (except me) commented on how good the audio sounded.

I thought the Yeti sounded like ~excrement~, and the Android was even worse. So I gave the Yeti to my wife to use for her weekly zoom meetings with her family and started my investigations into producing something halfway decent....which BTW, has led me here!

For the actual recording I used a pair of Cascade Fathead ribbon microphones in a blumlein pair through a consumer-grade Behringer audio interface and then into my MacBook, but when the quartet arrived at my house and saw the microphones set up, there was much comment about how much $$ I'd spent and "wow, this is SERIOUS, now!"

You can hear a medium quality, streamed MP3 of the recording here: https://soundcloud.com/user-70945569...oyage-1st-movt

Be kind! That is literally my first plunge into recording live chamber music, ever.

i don't comment on the work of colleagues - no matter if amateur or professional - but you deserve to be beaten up for using equipment from evil b!

^ This sounds perfectly fantastically fine-- you can tell the room doesn't have much of a reinforcing reverb and a few of the players could "linger" longer on a few notes and draw out maybe a more florid reading of the piece... but overall it's great, don't let anyone tell you different. Ribbons through a clean pre? Not sure if there's much that's better than that...

I know, I hang my head in shame... LOL

I was ignorant at the time! The one 4-input AI that popped up on Sweetwater and Reverb that didn't cause me to lose consciousness from the price was the "B", so I got it. It works fine, but....um. yeah. I'll be saving my nickels and dimes for something better and maybe less cheaply produced. I can also see myself moving up to a 6-input unit, at some point.

In that recording there are some squeaky chairs, foot thumping and one bad "digital splice" of recorded sections. I'm fine with the accessory noises, not so fine with the audible splice, but you know, "diminishing returns" and all that. There's a tiny bit of reverb added via Audacity in that recording but not much because as I added even just a bit more, it all sounded so "fake" that I couldn't stand it.

As for commenting or not commenting on my work. PLEASE COMMENT! I'm here to learn. I'm a rank beginner, and any contributions that contain suggestions on how to do it better next time are ~MORE~ than welcome!

I´ve always wondered why people don´t do it this or that way. All stupid? Today I know it better. I´m sure now that the often just can´t and have stopped to be angry

i'm glad you are aware of some of the issues surrounding evil b (and i'm quite serious about it)...

...but sorry, i won't comment on clips - mainly for three reasons:

- imo a recording alone can never give enough context as to how it came about; in the case of a recording for a major label, i don't care because i assume that more or less everything was done to achieve a good result, but in the case of less ambitious productions, a few words, a few pictures and the finished result don't tell me whether a meaningful, artistic and efficient use was made of the available possibilities or someone spent 200 hours snipping away at a few minutes of recordings rather than having re-tracked in a better room, using better gear etc. i cannot know about ambitions/goals either or under which cultural or social circumstances a recording was done.

- we all have slightly (or massively) different taste/we are biased!

- on the very few occasions i did comment here, it didn't go down well...

anyway, keep documenting your work and show us the results, no matter what my attitude is: continue with what you do, like to do and how you do it - except maybe ribbon mics but that's another discussion... ;-)

Message not measures

It seems the main point you’re making is that YouTube is giving airspace to a sub-standard non-pro (very likely audience member) recording. YouTube is not and never will be the arbiter of the audio or visual quality of the material they host….you know that, don’t you ?

If 4 people (perhaps including even the orchestra itself) submit a recording of the same event, YouTube will happily host all 4 versions to their individual accounts….there is no quality control arbitration nor quota ceiling of what gets publicly displayed.

The question you need to ask is whether the ‘substandard’ content is being posted to the orchestra’s own YouTube channel/account/page or not.

If not, it’s a moot point whether the posting of said material is damaging or detrimental to the orchestra’s public image ? You’d have to ask their publicity manager or chief conductor…chances are 50/50 that their response would be either ‘it’s good enough, any publicity is good publicity’ ….or ‘it misrepresents us, I wish the poster would take the video down’

While the situation persists that there can be multiple versions of the same recorded event hosted, by different user-accounts/channels…and even the orchestra itself is powerless (or perhaps even complicit-in…by neglect or disinterest) to having the low-fi versions removed, you can see it’s far from the simple scenario you’re painting.

To verify your assertions, you need to ask many more questions….as to whether the orchestra is having their recorded performance posted with or against their wishes, by whose YouTube account etc etc

By the same token, you can also see why many professional performers and ensembles expressly prohibit the taking of video and audio recordings by audiences at their concerts….it’s not to prevent ‘bootleggers’, and much more about control of their public image…or nowadays, visage !

It’s the social media video platforms you need to lobby and picket Tom: ‘No more crap content allowed’ !

Just as an aside, our live audiences are now about 1/3rd of what they were pre-Covid. We went 18 months with no public exposure but one of those cobbled-together "everybody is playing in their living room and sending in cell phone video" things that a nice guy in the first violin section put together. Then, for about 4 concerts we had a live audience, but the college insisted on social distancing between seating in the hall, so we could only get about 50-60 people in a hall that seats 400. Now they've dropped that requirement but instead of the 300+ that we would get all the time, with the occasional sold-out house, we're pulling in about 100. That really impacts revenues. We're not renting adventuresome scores, like we used to, we're doing a whole lot of stuff that's in the public domain, or that the college has in it's library.....and we're not paying a pro audio engineer to record the concerts and then putting that, sync'ed with video from 4-5-6 cell phones, up on YouTube.

Last weekends outdoor summer concert in the town square probably had 1200+, which was great but you know, that's an outdoor pops concert AND all the music was John Williams, which appeals to everybody.

There are five amateur orchestras here, locally, sandwiched between San Francisco and San Jose. The one with the big endowment, five paid staff, and a loyal following for 40 years is pulling in audiences about 60-80% of their usual. The one led by the former assistant conductor of the San Francisco Symphony is getting audiences of less than 50 people. I don't know how it's going in other places, but around here, the amateur/regional orchestras are taking a serious hit. In light of that, and the shortage of $$, it doesn't surprise me that what gets posted on social media has also taken a quality hit.

I’m guessing the (audio and video) quality of what gets posted today on social media has little or nothing to do with orchestra budgets, funding, audience numbers, covid or repertoire choices…and is hugely contingent on the ubiquity of handy pocket devices (phones, zoom recorders …or ‘shavers’ as Plush calls them) and the fully open and easy upload facility that Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo offers (once copyright is cleared, usually after a day or two).

It’s very often not the orchestra’s themselves doing the postings….but well-intentioned members of the public, who think they are doing their local/favourite musical groups a favour or a service ! If only those same folks hung out here a bit, they’d learn some valuable skills for upping their game !

Thus it’s ‘democratisation of tech’ driven, mainly…and there’s no quality bar being set on/by such delivery platforms

I listened to it. It sounds miles better than most of the garbage on soundcloud.

As I have stated in this thread a lot depends on what is important to the groups that are putting on the concerts. In my case one of the groups we used to record spend literally thousands of dollars on "glossy programs" and for what end? Most of them wind up in the rubbish containers after the concert is over.

In another case the former business manager of one of the groups we used to record is a very good friend and she and her husband and I went out for dinner the other night. She is working on the archives for the group as a volunteer. She said that up until we parted ways due to budget constraints the archives are in GREAT shape with all their CDs and DVDs labeled and still in playable shape. After we stopped doing the concerts the archives are, for the most part, nonexistent as the people who were doing the concerts for free never gave the group any physical media and only posted the results "on line". I had been with the group since their inception and until they ran into financial difficulties did all the recordings both video and audio.

I am not upset but with the local college taking over the recording of some of the groups and the loss of others due to financial problems the outcome for us was not good. We have basically stopped doing any concert recordings and that was a good 1/3 of our business.

I understand that today lots of smaller groups and regional ensembles are suffering from loss of revenue and shrinking budgets. I still think that there is room in their budgets for well done recordings by a skilled recording engineer OR by an amateur who is properly trained. There is a "lot of history" that is going the dustbin of history by not having a good well done recording and concerts are not being documented.

FWIW

That’s not the point you began with, but you have a legitimate complaint…however perhaps a greater concern should be that the sub-standard YouTube recordings WILL become the enduring historical record of those orchestras.

It’s YouTube that’s the dustbin …and nobody seems destined to empty that trash, ever ? So don’t worry about stuff not enduring….because unfortunately it will !

Stuff IS being documented, but not by you or the orchestra’s archivist….but in this new public repository

When I hear some recordings from 70s etc (like Itzhak Perlman solo, Midori, Henryk Szeryng etc.), there the Stradivari or Guarneri violins sound like chinese violins recorded in the bathroom so if self-recorded on todays iPhone etc., it would maybe sound quite better ?

Why do amateurs come on here arguing for "good enough?"

Answer: Because that is all they can do.

Right now, a lot of organizations like that are working with a Covid-era annual budget. Patrons aren't likely to donate a lot to an orchestra that might not even have a performance season. So when they do actually play out, the alternative to an amateur recording on an iPad is probably no recording at all. As a player in one those orchestras, playing for free, I'd take that kind of crap recording over no recording at all.

Late addition: for every terrible recording of a labor-of-love orchestra or ensemble, there's probably at least one competent recordist who couldn't be bothered to contribute for the same wages the players are getting. Good recording gear costs money and the skills have value too, but ask those local players how much longer they have to go to pay off the student loans on their music degrees.

There is a lot of unfounded, unhinged and flat out outlandish arrogance going on in this thread... kind of disgusting. :-(

I think it's that too many people have recording tools and no skill set - and more importantly no censoring people - everything gets out now days.

the gate keeers have (mostly) gone - if one still acts as such, one gets condemned for being 'elitist' and denigrated via (a)social media...

The primary problem with the plethora of poorly recorded audio in video is not the fact that an abundance of the videos offer sub standard audio: but that an overwhelming percentage of the public listening do not know, or care about the difference?
Hugh