The big band came to be in the early 1910's, with its peak in popularity from around the year 1930 to the early 1940's. A big band is considered to be a band over 10 or more members with four sections: trumpet, trombone, saxophone and rhythm, however the standard big band has 17 musicians consisting of 5 saxophones, 4 trombone, 4 trumpet, drums, bass, piano, guitar. The production section of this writing will focus on the 'Chris Walden Big Band' which is a standard big band of 17.
Characteristics of Big Band:
Big band is a sub genre of jazz, and largely dominated the jazz music scene in the early 1940's, Originally big bands began as dance music to perform live and be accompanied by social dancers. While Big band is a type of jazz, it actually places much less emphasis on improvisation and instead relies heavily on written sheet music and compositions, this gives a larger role to the band leader, arranger and the band as a whole, this lessens the importance of solo musicians.
Normally arrangements take the strophic form, which repeats a written chord structure in each stanza, commonly using the typical blues chorus format of 'twelve bar blues'. Swing and call & response are also characteristics of big band. Swing as a rhythmic term involves alternately lengthening and shortening certain sub-divisions in a rhythm, While call & response involves one section playing a musical phrase and then gets answered by another section with a musical phrase in response.
History:
Along with my previous genre study on jazz history, the creation of big band has its own interesting past.According to the University of Greenwich, the big band era started with leader-arranger Fletcher Henderson, who started the movement by enlarging the jazz band in numbers and establishing the four sections of the big band. This change to the traditional jazz band brought about a larger dynamic of range, tones, textures and energy to the overarching genre of jazz. Fred Parrett explains in his article on the 'History of Jazz & Big Band Music' that this expansion from Henderson encouraged many others renowned composers like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Lunceford and Glenn Miller. The compositions from these big names marked the peak of Big Band music before the genre began a decline after World War II. In the late 1990s, there was a surge in popularity in swing music, and the younger generation began to listen to big band again. Today the most common appearance of Big Band music and groups is on the American late-night talk show, which often uses them as house accompaniment bands.
Production:
A documentary called "The Art of Recording a Big Band" with Al Schmitt and Steve Genewick, today took me in a journey through the recording process of Chris Waldens Big Band. Heres a look at some of the production tools and techniques that these industry professionals used to record a world class big band!
Microphones: For this production they had access to the best microphones in the world, and after some careful investigation I was able to figure out most of the microphones used! They're using two cardioid Neumann M149's on the piano, and another two cardioid on the upright bass (one on the f-hole, the other up towards the finger board).
Omni M149's were also placed on each trumpet with a 10dB pad to keep the trumpets from overwhelming the mix. The trombones appear to have Royer-122V Vacuum Tube Ribbon Microphones on them.
While the drums have a AKG-452 mic with the A51 swivel elbow for the snare top, a SM57 on the snare bottom (phase flipped), AKG-C414s on toms, another AKG-452 on the high hat, an AKG-d112 on kick, two AKG-C12's for overheads and a Royer SF stereo mic (rare) above the conductor.
Lastly there are four room mics that will make up the majority of the mix, imitations of the RCA 10,001 were experimented with for the documentary, and I really like how the record turned out!
The goal of this mic set-up (as with all of Al Schmitt's work) was to create a clean, real and accurate reproduction of how each instrument is live. It's to enable any listener to be in the position of the conductor as an immersive experience that reflects the pieces energy as closely as possible.
Isolation: Vocals, Drums and the acoustic guitar amp are each in their separate booth to ensure a clean recording of each that can be mixed correctly into the track. The grand piano also has a custom sleeve over it, with holes for a stereo pair of mics, this reduces spill from the piano while still ensuring a beautiful clean reverberant tone from the instrument.
Leveling: Al Schmitt rides his faders as the record progresses, this is important for solo's and also means that at the end of the session, the recording is levelled and can almost be considered mixed!
EQ: Al Schmitt learned engineering at a time when EQ was much less accessible, so he learned how to use the microphone as the EQ, If something didn't sound as he wanted it, he'd change the mic, maybe to a brighter or warmer mic depending on the instrument.
"We probably won't use an EQ on this whole record" - Steve Genewick
His 'EQing' was actually microphone technique and choice, and he still makes strong use of this knowledge in his recordings today!
So check out a track from the recording, I've learnt a lot from studying this and hopefully you have too!
References:
1. Jazzinamerica.org. (2018). [online] Available at: http://www.jazzinamerica.org/LessonPlan/5/3/228 [Accessed 31 Oct. 2018].
2. Parrett, F. (2008). History of Jazz & Big Band Music. [online] University of Greenwich. Available at: https://www.gre.ac.uk/about-us/music/band/history [Accessed 31 Oct. 2018].
3. Thomas, B. (1994). The Origins Of Big Band Music. [online] Redhotjazz.com. Available at: http://www.redhotjazz.com/bigband.html [Accessed 31 Oct. 2018].
4. The Art Of Recording A Big Band. (2015). [DVD] Directed by A. Schmitt. California, America.
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