Something to remember, the recording engineer is a hired gun and does what he is told. The customer is always right even if the recording sounds like a POS.
Scotty
Scotty, I'm going to take a wild guess and say you haven't spent much time inside recording studios
. In the incident I recalled, the customer was the singer/songwriter I accompanied to the session. Do you think the engineer "did what he was told" by this s/s? Most musicians know very little about big studio recording and engineering, and certainly don't tell the engineer on duty how to do their job.
Here's the problem, and it relates to Danny's statement about someone knowing just enough to make them think they know what they are doing, but not really knowing enough to do it well: British recording engineer Andy Johns became renown for his Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums of the 70's. Now everybody wants the "Andy Johns" sound. So a young aspiring recording engineer goes to one of the big-city schools offering classes in that field, and learns of Andy Johns' technique of placing a distant mic in the recording room, to capture the big sound a room produces, one of the things that made Andy's recordings sound the way they do. But he isn't taught the basics of acoustic theory.
So along comes the singer/songwriter I'm with, and this young engineer puts a mic in the wall/ceiling corner, to record some room sound. What he doesn't know is that the corner of a room sounds terrible, the worst possible place to put a mic. That's not where Andy Johns put his ambience mic. During the playback of the recording, the ambience track was isolated, and everyone at the session agreed it sounded like s@&t. The recording of the song has to start anew, the singer/songwriter paying for the time wasted by this under-educated recording engineer to learn something he should have already known---acoustics theory. That's what I call on-the-job-training, paid for by the customer!
Andy Johns was hired by The Eagles to engineer an album with them. They were already huge stars, with a platinum album under their belts. Andy set up his mics, got his levels, and recording began. Hearing the playback of the first song, drummer Don Henley asked Andy to turn up his kick drum level, it wasn't prominent enough in the mix. Don hadn't noticed that Andy Johns, unlike a normal engineer, doesn't "close" mic a drummer's kick; he records a drumset with an overhead stereo mic, a mic on the snare drum, and a distant "ambience" mic. There was no way to turn up the kick drum, it wasn't on it's own isolated track. Andy told Don that if he wanted his kick louder, he should hit it harder. So much for an engineer being a hired gun and doing what he is told!
