Introduction
This chapter is about recording consoles, the very heart of a recording studio. Like our own heart, whose action is felt everywhere in our own bodies, consideration of a recording console involves wide-ranging considerations of other elements within the studio system. These, too, are covered in this chapter.
In pop and rock music, as well as in most jazz recordings, each instrument is almost always recorded onto one track of multitrack tape and the result of the “mix” of all the instruments combined together electrically inside the audio mixer and recorded onto a two-track (stereo) master tape for production and archiving purposes. Similarly, in the case of sound reinforcement for rock and pop music and jazz concerts, each individual musical contributor is miked separately and the ensemble sound mixed electrically. It is the job of the recording or balance engineer to control this process. This involves many aesthetic judgements in the process of recording the individual tracks (tracking) and mixing down the final result. However, relatively few parameters exist under her/his control. Over and above the office of correctly setting the input gain control so as to ensure best signal to noise ratio and control of channel equalization, her/his main duty is to judge and adjust each channel gain fader and therefore each contributor’s level within the mix. A further duty, when performing a stereo mix, is the construction of a stereo picture or image by controlling the relative contribution each input channel makes to
the two, stereo mix amplifiers. In cases of both multitrack mixing and multimicrophone mixing, the apparent position of each instrumentalist within the stereo picture (image) is controlled by a special stereophonic panoramic potentiometer, or pan pot for short.