Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 6: The Super Cheap Options

In the previous parts of this series, I was talking about specific locations in the world where you can record orchestras and my personal quality ranking of these.

In this part, I will not mention any specific recording services and locations as all the experiences I'm going to talk about in this part are experiences I wouldn't want to repeat and I don't want to upset anybody with my words but it is indeed not necessary to mention specific locations or services as there is one general rule that you can apply.

In general, any full session with a full orchestra that is cheaper than around 3000-3500 US$ or Euros should cause a lot of red flags as they will consequentially be qualitative not at a standard that you would expect or need from a professional recording. 

Here are several things that I have encountered in the past, usually those sessions were not my own sessions but rather orchestration or arrangement jobs where I was also (virtually) present at the recording session.

Musicians:

In many countries especially in the Eastern Part of Europe, being a musician does not sustain a living. Many musicians in these countries do other jobs or have extensive teaching schedules which prevents them from dedicating enough time to practice their craft. Consequentially, you will get performances that are often problematic. Add the problems with sight reading that will most likely occur and you are in for a really problematic session.

In a recording session a few years back, I remember I had written a passage for the first violins that exceeded the C two octaves above middle C but didn't get anywhere close to the C an octave higher. It was no particularly tricky ryhthm but rather stepwise motion in medium long notes. The result after even a few takes was more of a cluster than anything that was anywhere near of being in tune. We actually decided to tacet that part and add it with samples later. This was not the only problematic performance in this session but the one that was causing the most headache.

Instruments:

In that very same session, we however had another issue. There were a few positions particularly in the woodwind section that had an incredibly unpleasant tone. I cannot say for sure whether this was down to the players themselves, but my hunch was that it was rather down to the instruments. Of course, living in a country where the median income is quite low, you simply cannot spend thousands of dollars on instruments but need to go with cheaper models. I usually would argue that a few cheap string instruments in the sections will not make a fundamental difference, but when players have an exposed solo on a cheap instrument, you will definitely notice.

Studio:

In one session about two years ago, I was present via source connect and when the video stream started, I almost didn't believe my eyes. I saw an orchestra crammed into a place that looked a little like a community center. Low ceiling, large windows covered by heavy curtains one one side, a concrete wall on the other, a surface area where a 50 piece orchestra felt like they barely fit in the room sitting on chairs that looked like from a restaurant from the 80s. The sound was awful, even if they had put the LSO into that space, it would have been a complete disaster. The interesting part was that the company advertised on their web site with a quite modern spaceous looking studio which "wasn't available for our session due to construction". I'm not sure whether the composer who I worked for at this gig got a discount after this but the recordings that I heard needed to be helped and substituted a lot with virtual instruments..

Equipment/Recording Staff:

Similarly to what I explained about cheap instruments above, there can also be problems with the recording equipment. Great microphones for orchestra recordings are expensive and you need a lot to record it properly. Additionally, a capable Protools System is expensive as well. On top of that you need an engineer who knows how to place microphones properly which only comes with a lot of experience. Just earlier this year before everything went to lockdown I had a remote session for a client where we later found out that the micing was a total mess. We only heard the monitor mix through source connect which sounds rather messy as with every monitor mix (as you just pull up every microphone so any problems can be heard immediately) but later found out that the right decca tree signal was angled at a way that it picked up trombones only and almost no trumpets who were sitting right next to the trombones. This was most likely to a faulty angleing of the microphone or using a way too directional microphone but the Decca Tree signal was almost unusable due to this problem.

In general, you should be very cautious when pushing recording budgets too low. Some services offer incredibly low rates but very often the end results will be very disappointing.

I'm not saying that there might be the occasional gem among these services but the risk is very high of getting something that feels like money wasted.

I know that particularly for composers who are just at the beginning of their career it seems incredibly attractive to record with a real orchestra. The temptation to hire a super cheap service as soon as you have a little budget available just to fulfill this dream of having your music performed live is absolutely understandable.

And even with me having the attitude of always recording as much as possible live for my projects, I generally would advice to always prefer a good virtual production over a bad live recording. Having some slightly plastic sounding strings will be way less obstrusive for the audience than having out of tune strings. Bad performances are way more obvious than slightly fake sounding samples.

Again, I could write a list of all the bad recording experiences I had in the past but they all share the one property of being super cheap. Getting a good orchestral sound costs money and if you really want a recording to be happy with you should not go any lower than the levels of recording locations that I described in the previous parts of this series.

If you really need to save money, try to come up with other plans to make it work. Hiring only a few soloists or writing a score for a limited line-up can for instance be good starting points. Of course, the ever popular Hybrid productions can also help to save budget.

For instance, I have seen some colleagues do mixed sessions of for instance recording strings in Prague or Budapest and record the Brass in London to get that cutting edge quality. There's nothing wrong with that and it should also be no problem for a talented mixing engineer to make these two recordings sound like it's recorded in one location.