Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 5: Prague, Budapest etc.

Recording orchestras in Eastern European countries has become an increasingly popular alternative in recent years to the "usual" recording locations. In fact, the exodus of recording in LA (and London) has a lot to do with productions recording more in such locations while also shooting movies has increasingly moved to these countries (with Prague being particularly popular).

The main reason - of course - is the financial benefit as recording in these countries usually comes at a fraction of the costs of recording in LA or London.

Prague

From my personal experience, I had by far the most orchestral recording sessions in Prague, with my first recording in 2006 and regularly returning there so I have a pretty clear idea of what to expect and how to work with the local conditions.

There are two main observations that I could make over these years:

1. The studios have become increasingly more busy. While it was no problem in my "early days" there to get a recording slot even on short notice, nowadays one needs to ask further in advance for a recording slot. Particularly on short turn around commercial work, this has made things a bit more tricky.

2. The musician's quality has increased. When I was there the first few times, you could often expect that one section or one exposed player might not be up to the challenge and we needed to repeat takes due to reading errors or bad intonation. This has changed drastically. Of course with all the session work they keep getting, they get more routined but also the pool of musician is changing in favour of younger players. Also the technical standard of the studios has increased with state of the art technology and microphones being installed over the last few years there. 

While the musicians and the technology in Prague has evolved tremendously, there is still one problem that persists: there is no great recording venue in the city of the caliber like Air, Abbey Road or Teldex that would be suitable for larger film scores.

Most of my recordings there I have done in Smecky Studio, which is the most freuquented recording studio in the city.

As you can see, while it can hold a large symphony setup the room is relatively small and while it has a quite nice proporiton regarding ceiling height, it is definitely a "small studio" with all the pros and cons that come with that fact.

On the upside, any intimate, small scale score sounds fabulous in this room. You get a lot of detail and transparency on smaller and softer recordings, but also larger setups that are more detailed work great such as this score I recorded there:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-RS4n1F1VY 

The downside is that it is impossible to get an epic "filmic" sound in this room. Even a medium sized brass section at ff can easily overpower the rest of the orchestra. Additionally the crammed seating (for instance the horns) will diminish the "epicness" of the sound even if the players deliver an epic tone. The early reflections from the side and back walls on the brass will also make it impossible to cosiderably enlargen the size impression of the room with reverb.

As a consequence of the room situation, the players tend to play "safe", so if you look for an edgy fortissimo you might need to encourage them verbally and still not get what you need as it is physically just very taxing for instance for a trumpet player to sit in a room without any reverb and considerable size and blow the brains out of the musicians sitting in front of them.

Another phenomenon that I have observed a lot in Prague (which has gotten better in recent years) is that due to the low prices they have comparatively to the world market, they need to play a lot of music by composers who would be better advised to not do their own orchestrations. There is a considerable "distrust" in the material that is being put in front of the musicians as they not rarely get horrible parts to play from. So there might be a few questions of "whether this is intentional" that hold up the session from time to time.

One more thing that I observed is that particularly brass players tend to play safe. It took a few years of recording there to understand why that is the case. One day I came into the studio while another session was still going on in its fourth hour and the composer who was currently recording there decided that it would be a great idea to cram as much "epic brass music" into the session as possible. So the brass have been playing for four hours straight being requested to play ff all the time. Of course they couldn't do it and got increasingly softer and uncontrolled in their embouchure while the composer got increasingly angry for them not delivering what he expected and running out of time. After that I spoke to a few people there and it kind of made me understand why the brass very often save up energy as they are continuously suspicious whether there might be a client in the booth who doesn't understand their natural physical limitations.

Coming back to the studio situation in Prague, there are of course a few more studios but none of them  are larger in size than Smecky except for the "Dvorak Hall" at Rudolfinum which is a concert hall.

I recorded only twice there but both times rather recently.

However this hall doesn't come without problems either. First and biggest one is the availability. As it is used as one of the main concert halls of the city, it has a busy concert schedule so getting into it might be tricky and sometimes sessions are only possible late in the evening (which does usually compromise the playing quality).

Regarding ambience it is the complete opposite of Smecky. The reverb tail is enormous and particularly loud busy percussion parts tend to drown out the rest of the orchestra in reverb.

Another downside is that the stage is actually not really big, so the max capacity is a standard sized symphony orchestra. Any larger setup will become problematic to fit.

Also, the wiring into the recording studio has some issues which creates sometimes a soft ground loop hum noise on some signals which in softer parts might be problematic.

But essentially if you write with that space in mind you can get great sounding recordings and fantastic footage from the recording in this venue.

This hall of course is a bit more expensive than Smecky Studio but not much (about 100 Euros per hour more)

As described above, the quality of the musicians in Prague has grown over the last few years, particularly the strings sound wonderful and their sight reading ability is really good. The brass and woodwinds are solid to very good but of course not at the standard of London/LA. A sound compromise however often even isn't the problem with the players themselves but the problem with the studio acoustics.

For a budget calculation one needs to know that the standard session length in Prague is 4 hours (including 30 minutes of break so net 3.5 hours of recording time). The recordings are complete buyouts and there is no limitation to overdubbing etc. Some fixers limit the maximum time to record per session to 20 minutes of music.

There is very often the option to book half a session which comes around 66-75% of the price of a full session, so often a full session is the better choice. More recently, fixers also started to allow booking on per hour basis but generally the most cost efficient version is a full session.

Here's a relatively recent budget estimate for one session at Smecky Studio:

Studio (Protools, Logistics, Technical, Equipment, Instrument rental): 900 EUR

Musician: 64 EUR per Session x 60 Musicians: 3840 EUR

Conductor: 360 EUR

Sound Engineers: approx. 400 EUR

Copying/Printing/Sorting: approx. 300 EUR

Fixer Fee: approx. 500 EUR

Total: approx. 6300 EUR

As you can see, we're only slightly above a third of the costs of the locations that I covered in the last parts of this series which is a considerable difference.

Prague offers recordings remotely which you can attend via HQ source connect audio stream.

Budapest

My experiences of recordings in Budapest are more limited and have only been done remotely so far.

From a budget level, Budapest is usually slightly below Prague (about 10%), however from my experiences I have to say that the musician's quality is also slightly weaker.

Studio 22 is the most frequented recording stage in Budapest which is slightly bigger than Smecky Studio in Prage.

If I had to chose between the two locations I would probably prefer Prague for the better musicians but on certain super tight budget situations, going to Budapest might be a viable option.

There are a few more options in this price range like Bratislava, Macedonia, Brno and Bulgaria which however are less popular and I didn't directly record with any of those so I can't comment on their quality.

With the above described options you usually get a reasonable to good result at a very reasonable price.

There are even cheaper options further East that I will cover in the next part.