John Zorn, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Mike Patton, John Cage, Throbbing Gristle, Lee Ranaldo / Sonic Youth, 45 Grave, Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs, John Coltrane, Duane Denison, Trevor Dunn, Bill Laswell, Dan the Automator, Miles Davis, Earth, Shakti, Melvins, Quincy Jones, Masahiko Togashi.
A microphone is an example of a transducer, a device that changes information from one form to another. Sound information exists as patterns of air pressure; the microphone changes this information into patterns of electric current. The recording engineer is interested in the accuracy of this transformation, a concept he thinks of as fidelity.
Stereo sound is an illusion of spaciousness produced by playing a recording back through two speakers. The success of this illusion is referred to as the image. A good image is one in which each instrument is a natural size, has a distinct location within the sound space, and does not move around. The main factors that establish the image are the relative strength of an instrument's sound in each speaker, and the timing of arrival of the sounds at the listener's ear. In a studio recording, the stereo image is produced artificially. Each instrument has its own microphone, and the various signals are balanced in the console as the producer desires. In a concert recording, where the point is to document reality, and where individual microphones would be awkward at best, it is most common to use two mics, one for each speaker.
There is an aura of mystery about microphones. To the general public, a recording engineer is something of a magician, privy to a secret arcana, and capable of supernatural feats. A few modern day engineers encourage this attitude, but it is mostly a holdover from the days when studio microphones were expensive and fragile, and most people never dealt with any electronics more complex than a table radio. There are no secrets to recording; the art is mostly a commonsense application of [recording] principles. If there is an arcana, it is an accumulation of trivia achieved through experience ...
The Electret Ensemble is an improvisational, avant-garde, noise group based in St. Petersburg, FL.
There are currently no plans to record this project, so you'll have to catch us in the moment. However, there will appear the occasional live recording or video and we will be sure to post them here.
