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Are new cast recordings "The aural equivalent of an airbrushed photograph,"

Are new cast recordings "The aural equivalent of an airbrushed photograph,"

binau Profile Photo
binau
#1Are new cast recordings "The aural equivalent of an airbrushed photograph,"
Posted: 4/12/13 at 8:02pm

See this well-liked review of the new FOLLIES cast recording:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DYIDUTFQTD5S/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R2DYIDUTFQTD5S

I will admit that when I see shows in person (after being conditioned on cast recordings) hearing a contrast in singing softly/loudly is particularly noticeable and not something I am used to hearing. Is there a problem?




"You can't overrate Bernadette Peters. She is such a genius. There's a moment in "Too Many Mornings" and Bernadette doing 'I wore green the last time' - It's a voice that is just already given up - it is so sorrowful. Tragic. You can see from that moment the show is going to be headed into such dark territory and it hinges on this tiny throwaway moment of the voice." - Ben Brantley (2022) "Bernadette's whole, stunning performance [as Rose in Gypsy] galvanized the actors capable of letting loose with her. Bernadette's Rose did take its rightful place, but too late, and unseen by too many who should have seen it" Arthur Laurents (2009) "Sondheim's own favorite star performances? [Bernadette] Peters in ''Sunday in the Park,'' Lansbury in ''Sweeney Todd'' and ''obviously, Ethel was thrilling in 'Gypsy.'' Nytimes, 2000
Updated On: 4/12/13 at 08:02 PM

sephyr
#2Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 8:18pm

Well, I had listened to the cast recording of Legally Blonde in the car and noticed the spoken parts sounded way quieter than the singing. I have noticed this with quite a few cast recordings. Maybe it's my car stereo but sometimes I have trouble hearing what the characters are saying.

I agree that the sound can be tinny and mechanical at times. Alot of these recordings just don't have that warmth of sound they used to you know?

CATSNYrevival Profile Photo
CATSNYrevival
#2Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 8:19pm

I certainly understand where he's coming from and I think a lot of people here would agree, but I do not. I love the way the new Follies recording sounds compared to the OBC and I think it's a major improvement. There are some older recordings that are still leaps and bounds better than their revival recordings in terms of audio quality, and the warmth of the sound that he's talking about, but not Follies.

Updated On: 4/12/13 at 08:19 PM

theatredk Profile Photo
theatredk
#3Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 8:32pm

I find on practically all cast recordings with dialogue from Gilbert & Sullivan to Follies the dialogue is quieter which can be irritating it is fine if you are sitting down quietly but it you are not, half the time i think something is wrong with the recording and then check to find it's the dialogue I think the reason is that while recorded at the same volume the songs come across louder as they tend to projected more.

SeanMartin Profile Photo
SeanMartin
#4Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 8:36pm

Well, face it, it's like the difference between a singer in the studio and a singer on the stage. Of course they're gonna manipulate the sound of a cast recording: they want it to sound as perfect as possible since this is pretty much the only record of the show one will get.

True, they're not as warm as they used to be, but I chalk that up to a production tech team that wants Every. Single. Thing. Perfect.... even at the loss of its "theatricality". Record producers back in the heyday of OBC recordings were theatre people. Now they're folks from rock bands moonlighting on a sound board.


http://docandraider.com

Charley Kringas Inc Profile Photo
Charley Kringas Inc
#5Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 9:04pm

I can't disagree with that review, there's an obsessive cleanliness to modern cast recordings that can stamp down the living aspect of theatre. When it comes to sound I tend to prefer a lively performance over a clean sound, which is why my favorite album right now is "Applause", which is an ecstatic recording even if it is, aurually, a mess in comparison to modern cast recordings. To me it's sort of like how you can hear if someone's smiling while they sing, their voice takes on a certain ebullient quality and I think it's certainly possible that obsessively scrubbing a performance could, and sometimes does, kill that. Of course, I'm also averse to the pitch-perfect "American Idol" style of singing, so I suppose take this with a pinch of salt. I'd rather hear character than staff lines.

sephyr
#6Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 9:38pm

I agree wholeheartedly. Now there are moments like when the Von Tussels come in with their "yes you can..." on You Can't Stop The Beat (Hairspray OBC) where I would've preferred it be on pitch LOL but it was exciting!! That's what we're missing in alot of these recordings...that excitement, that feeling that you're right there listening to these people perform for you, you know?

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Playbilly
#7Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/12/13 at 9:44pm

The studio-created reverb on today's OCR can be annoying. Especially in the spoken moments.j


"Through The Sacrifice You Made, We Can't Believe The Price You Paid..For Love!"

Dave19
#8Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 5:50am

I think most Broadway cast recordings nowadays sound cheap, dry, tinny and very low budget. Like they are recorded in a concrete room with a keyboard. I agree with that poster on Amazon.

I don't think is has anything to do with the fact that it is studio and they want it to be perfect. There are plenty of studio recordings that sound rich, full and have great acoustics. For example the original London cast recording of Miss Saigon.

SeanMartin Profile Photo
SeanMartin
#9Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 7:56am

>> Like they are recorded in a concrete room with a keyboard

... which is pretty much how all recordings are done these days After all, when the bulk of the industry is four guys, a couple of guitars, and a drum kit, how much room do you need? So now we have recordings done with 10-member "orchestras" and the cast brought in separately to record over it, and some electronic enhancement to autotune the whole thing... just to make it note-wise perfect. But that's been the case now for a decade.

After all, the original London cast of Miss Saigon was recorded in what year?


http://docandraider.com

HoldThatThought Profile Photo
HoldThatThought
#10Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 9:47am

So is there a reason why they can't record a few of the live performances and take the best cuts from each one? It would be cheaper, and most people would probably prefer a live recording. I know I would.

Dave19
#11Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 11:26am

SeanMartin, you are right, it is like that nowadays and it really is a shame.

But I don't see why "nowadays" should equal "bad acoustics", "lesser talent (not singing on key without autotune)", "bad quality microphones" and an overall cheap sound in Broadway Cast Recordings.

What is it that was available in the 90's that does not exist anymore? Because plenty of those recordings sound excellent.

g.d.e.l.g.i. Profile Photo
g.d.e.l.g.i.
#12Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 12:38pm

So is there a reason why they can't record a few of the live performances and take the best cuts from each one? It would be cheaper, and most people would probably prefer a live recording. I know I would.

For a long time, I've been thinking that this approach (see link below) would be more useful than seeing if a major label would invest in a conventional cast recording, and much more collectible for the audience member. In addition to the usual recording method, if the actors are really sensitive about the "perfect take," the engineers can deploy their usual tricks (Melodyne, AutoTune, what-have-you, used sparingly) en vivo before the CD is pressed.

Then, at the end of the run, you edit together the best performances and put together a "definitive" take for the commercial market, if the show is either a collectable flop or a worthwhile investment.

It goes like this...


Formerly gvendo2005
Broadway Legend
joined: 5/1/05

Blocked: After Eight, suestorm, david_fick, emlodik, lovebwy, Dave28282, joevitus
Updated On: 4/13/13 at 12:38 PM

Kad Profile Photo
Kad
#13Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 1:19pm

"What is it that was available in the 90's that does not exist anymore? Because plenty of those recordings sound excellent."

It's cheaper. Cast recordings are a niche market now- and it doesn't help that most of their sales are undoubtedly now coming from digital downloads. They keep their overhead costs lower so they could more easily be made back or exceeded.


"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."

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winston89
#14Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 3:39pm

Kad,

Haven't cast recordings been a niche market for awhile though? Gone are the days where popular tunes come from Broadway shows. With that said, I can understand in this day and age, doing things quickly and on the cheap to save as much money as possible. However, why is it that there are so many cast recordings from the 90's that sound amazing and that there are new ones that have come out within the last ten years that don't sound so good as their 90's counterparts?

I just have trouble believing that cast recordings, in terms of sales, have changed considerably since the 90s.


"If you try to shag my husband while I am still alive, I will shove the art of motorcycle maintenance up your rancid little Cu**. That's a good dear" Tom Stoppard's Rock N Roll

Kad Profile Photo
Kad
#15Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 4:28pm

Things have changed even since the 90s. The market has shrunk more. How music has sold has changed- the industry has changed. And many of the studios that were producing cast albums have folded or been sold or folded into other departments .

Here's an article from 2002 about the difficulties facing cast recordings.
THEATER; Hard Times for Cast Albums, to Broadway's Regret


"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."

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yankeefan7
#16Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 4:37pm

Holdthatthought - I agree and always wondered the same thing.

frontrowcentre2 Profile Photo
frontrowcentre2
#17Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 5:35pm

That is a great article you have linked, Kad. The question of teh cost of making a cast album comes up frequently on BWW as does teh question of how many units teh record has to sell to break even:

'It is very difficult to record a new Broadway show for under $300,000 and, quite frankly, it can be much more than that,' said Denis McNamara, senior vice president for Decca/Decca Broadway, part of the Universal Classics group. 'You really have to sell in excess of 150,000 units to see a profit."

Every time Bryan whines about no cast album for CRY BABY this article explains why it was never done. It would not be a profitable venture for a label to back, and the show's producers were unwilling to underwrite the cost. Revivals are even less likely to be recorded because they compete with the "original" OCR's which further diminishes the sales of newer editions. The original 78-rpm set of OKLAHOMA! sold over a million copies. A year after it was released on CD, the reissue was reported as having sold 80,000 units. Very few modern cast albums sell that well or consistently. WICKED, RENT and JERSEY BOYS have. Would a CD of HANDS ON A HARD BODY sell like that? Probably not.



As for how albums are recorded, somebody asked "is there a reason why they can't record a few of the live performances and take the best cuts from each one? It would be cheaper, and most people would probably prefer a live recording. I know I would."

I would NOT.

Sound quality is a huge issue because the Broadway theaters were not built to be recording studios. Compare the sound of audience-made bootleg tapes with sound board feeds and then with studio made recordings. The audience made tapes require you follow along with a script to be able to understand every line being said of sung. The soudn system tapes are full of stage noise as performers move about the set and again many lines are off-mic and lost.

Also, If you record live, the performers cannot adjust the performances to play for the ear alone when they are so involved with playing to spectators. Dialogue could not be changed, song intros and endings could not be altered, tempos could not be increased resulting in a loss of enthusiasm and excitement. Then you would have the added concerns of audience noise; watches beeping, cell phones going off..we don't want those preserved on a cast album. Album producers could not enlarge the orchestras for a richer fuller sound and the albums would sound very thin.

People who advocate for live recordings are seeking a direct souvenir of their experience, forgetting that a majority of people who buy cast albums are outside of New York and may never get to see these shows live. If you eliminate that market by catering to the core audience who see shows on Broadway, sales will be significantly reduced.

Also I am not sure how to come to the conclusion it would be cheaper. Remote engineering is quite expensive, you would still have to pay the cast and musicians equity minimums and the extra costs (arrangers fees, copyists fees, fees to use production photos in the booklets, poster artwork) would still apply.

No major savings woudl result.


Cast albums are NOT "soundtracks."
Live theatre does not use a "soundtrack." If it did, it wouldn't be live theatre!

I host a weekly one-hour radio program featuring cast album selections as well as songs by cabaret, jazz and theatre artists. The program, FRONT ROW CENTRE is heard Sundays 9 to 10 am and also Saturdays from 8 to 9 am (eastern times) on www.proudfm.com

exedore
#18Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 6:15pm

"Compare the sound of audience-made bootleg tapes with sound board feeds and then with studio made recordings. "

As someone with a number of all of the above, I can say that I have plenty of live-recorded cast albums (usually from Europe) that sound fantastic, as well as official band releases off the soundboard like Marillion's Front Row Club releases (some of which were NOT originally intended for more than archive). It requires some work in the setup (usually by patching in a multitrack and getting clean channel feeds vs. just taking a raw dump from the board), but you can get a fantastic recording on the night. Someone posted a link to ConcertLive above - some bands do this for every gig, even in 1000 person venues.

Also, check the energy on something like the Legally Blonde London cast recording (iffy mixing and all) versus the Broadway one. Doing it live just gets a little bit of magic that's not there in studio.

frontrowcentre2 Profile Photo
frontrowcentre2
#19Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 7:29pm

Doing it live just gets a little bit of magic that's not there in studio.

That "live" magic can be created in studio. Cast album producers going back to Goddard Lieberson and Jack Kapp quickly learned how to translate the feeling of a live performance from stage to records. The performers had to learn to adjust their performances accordingly but the very best studio made albums communicate vivid theatricality: The 1959 OBCR of GYPSY and the 1970 OBCR of COMPANY have it to spare. Part of it is the recording technique...the placement of microphones and the separation between singers. When you see pictures or recent cast album sessions, singers are placed in isolation booths so not only do they record as isolated tracks, they also do not have the interaction with co-stars. That's the bigger problem.


Cast albums are NOT "soundtracks."
Live theatre does not use a "soundtrack." If it did, it wouldn't be live theatre!

I host a weekly one-hour radio program featuring cast album selections as well as songs by cabaret, jazz and theatre artists. The program, FRONT ROW CENTRE is heard Sundays 9 to 10 am and also Saturdays from 8 to 9 am (eastern times) on www.proudfm.com

Charley Kringas Inc Profile Photo
Charley Kringas Inc
#20Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 8:06pm

D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of the recording of the Company album is really enlightening, there are discussions of how to translate a performance to the studio (which stumps Stritch) and the whole process is vividly present and "together".

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morosco
#21Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 10:12pm

I really don't like the techniques used on many OCRs today. There's no sense of space. It's as if every performer is standing directly beside you in a small soundproof padded booth and speaking directly into your ear. I know many will argue that an OCR is a different medium and it's not necessarily supposed to sound like you're sitting in the theatre but I wish there was a way to make recordings just a bit more theatrical.

Compare the original Promises Promises overture to the recent revival. The orginal seems to really leap off the disc but the revival just lays there without any energy at all.

darquegk Profile Photo
darquegk
#22Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/13/13 at 11:14pm

Part of it too is that voices have changed- not in terms of Idol-esque singing, but simply in terms of what people SOUND like, at least on Broadway.

Consider Company 2006 versus Company 1973. The Esparza cast uniformly sounded like a group of hip, rich, still fairly youthful New York thirty-or-fortysomethings who have utterly blinded themselves to the fact that Undeniable Middle Age is going to get them, like it or not. The cast in 1973, by comparison, sound decidedly middle-aged or later.

Also, the hard New York-cum-Jewish-by-proxy cadences that used to be de riguer have been mostly phased out- the standard Broadway dialectic is now a Northeast-Atlantic-Neutral, same as you hear on television, the news and in most American professional life. Before, people sounded older, more Jewish, more New York, and less "flat and round," to characterize modern "accent-less" speech.

bk
#23Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/14/13 at 1:44am

"I certainly understand where he's coming from and I think a lot of people here would agree, but I do not. I love the way the new Follies recording sounds compared to the OBC and I think it's a major improvement. There are some older recordings that are still leaps and bounds better than their revival recordings in terms of audio quality, and the warmth of the sound that he's talking about, but not Follies. "

Really. Because I find the newly remixed Follies to be so far and away superior to the recent recording it's not even funny. Perhaps you haven't heard the remix because it is a whole different beast than the original two CDs that were out on Angel. All these years they've blamed bad engineering on the original Follies - the engineering was superb - the mixing was the problem and that was grotesque, but it's all been changed and fixed now and Follies, the one and only, sounds just like any of the classic Sondheim cast albums from Columbia. The new one, for my taste, sounds thin, too dry, and makes a huge band sound like fifteen. And that happens with a lot of today's albums - several of today's producers do not understand "space" and "air" and things sound antiseptic and like they were recorded in a closet when you don't have the proper space and air. Just listen to any Goddard Lieberson cast album and you'll hear how it should be.

As to dialogue levels, producers today like to shut off ALL reverb for the dialogue and that is just a ridiculous thing - to have talking in one space and singing and music in an entirely other kind of space. And then they don't even out the levels, which is why you can't hear stuff. That thing on amazon is right save for one comment - it has nothing to do with digital and everything to do with producers who simply do not understand sound. It's really that simple.

Updated On: 4/14/13 at 01:44 AM

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larrystyles
#24Are new cast recordings
Posted: 4/14/13 at 1:59am

lol do people really give this much thought to "cast recordings"? tragic