Recording Spaces

Chapter 6

Orchestral rooms

Orchestral music was designed to be performed live. When many of the great classical works were written there was no such thing as recording, so the instrumentation and structure of the music was aimed only at its performance in spaces with audiences. Transferring the performance into a studio, perhaps of only just sufficient size to fit the whole orchestra, imposes a completely different set of conditions. As was discussed in Chapter 4, a big constraint on the achievement of a natural orchestral sound in studios is the fact that the whole process is usually entombed in a massive acoustic containment shell. This removes even further the ambience of the studios from that of the concert halls.

Today, much orchestral recording ...