This was a more involved process than the recording of the Django jazz Cd Swing 41, certainly much more involved than the recording of the live tracks such as Je Suis Seul Ce Soir, but the overriding principle was very simple. Keep it sounding real.

Keeping it real however does not mean do nothing. When I was studying to be a sound engineer I had a tutor once tell me how he had to make sound effects for a radio drama. One of the tasks that stuck out in his mind was when he had to capture the sound of a bottle of champagne being opened and poured into glasses. He found the best way to get the sound was to empty a bucket of water into a bath. The point is that a violin recorded accurately and left unprocessed doesn’t necessarily sound like a violin, not to me anyway. In the case of swing 41 I had to build up the body of each instrument using layers of reverb.

I hardly touched the eq, and used some compression to keep levels under control. The whole process could have been quite quick, but I had borrowed the digital multitrack and had to return it and I could not find a way of transferring the files to the pc. As a result I had to get everything right and then make the final mixes, no hope of remixing a week later. As a result I used about 100 hours trying to get the most out of what I had recorded without over processing the sound.

All this though was easy compared to publishing and promoting Swing41 which I will tell you about in another post.