I have always thought classical music should be recorded with uncompromised technical quality. This meant to me at least using a "live" venue for recording and having good enough source material that would not require messing with it too much in mastering. Achieving natural sound quality during recording was also a very high priority. But does a natural sound exist?

The music being heard is influenced by so many factors, from the sound effect of a particular hall, choices of particular recording format and equipment, not to mention the instruments, placement of the microphones and such trivial things as freshness of the strings and the temperature.

For the recording of Aurora's Valsa Negra disc I chose a minimalistic setup. A medium-sized church was chosen as the recording venue as well as a simple and transparent recording system consisting of DPA matched stereo pair microphones without transformers, Millennia preamplifiers, Mytek DAC and a solid state recorder. One of the particular challenges in recording classical guitars is the relatively low level of sound pressure, and I chose not to over amplify the signal from the microphones, which would result in slightly grainy sound. A high resolution format of 24 bit resolution and 96kHz sampling rate allowed for enough latitude with the signal level and helped tremendously with sound quality.

But as we soon found out, recording on location involves a particular set of challenges. First of all there always is some level of ambient noise, either the random noises originating outside of the venue or the ventilation and lighting systems inside of the building that could leave a slight imprint on the sound of the recording. But we loved the way the music sounded recoded in a live venue, the notes had air around them and seemed to beam effortlessly from the instruments and fade gently into the silence, far from the bloated sound achieved by recording in a small studio and adding reverberation in post production. So a dilemma presented itself- do we leave some noise on the recording or use some sort of post production noise removal tools that could also affect the natural quality of the sound we were so much after? The A/B comparisons were very interesting. The noise removal ended up affecting the sound slightly, but also improved overall perceptive quality as well. At the end everyone agreed that a great sounding recording might not equal a raw signal coming out of the recorders. Some processing is almost always necessary to achieve optimal sound qualty. And even though the noise removal did end up sounding different from the original material we went with it. Simply because CD as a medium of transmiting musical information has its constraints and demands, and we felt that that way we achieved the best possible sound we could produce. The recording quality ended up being very audiophile and very natural as well. It also meant that we did not have to spend a lot of money on a big recording studio and doing our own recording has enabled the group to produce more releases and record more interesting repertoire.