Have you ever wondered why we happily edit photographs—but somehow feel guilty about editing audio?
We have long known that photos in newspapers and magazines are almost always ‘air brushed’. As Smartphones got better, we all started to realise that this was something that we could now do ourselves.
As a result, the majority of people will ‘enhance’ their photos.
Why do we edit photos?
We often edit photos to either correct something or to add something artistic.
Corrective Editing
Whilst we might say ‘the camera never lies’. Yet it often doesn’t capture exactly what we see. In these cases we’ll often seek to remedy that digitally.
Almost nobody thinks adjusting the brightness of a photograph is cheating.
If the camera made the picture too dark, we simply correct it.
If the colours don’t quite match what we remember seeing, we adjust them.
We’re not trying to deceive anyone—we’re trying to make the photograph look more like what we actually saw.
Artistic Editing
We can also edit things to compensate for things. For example, if we took a photo on a dull day, we might apply a filter to brighten it up.
We might also remove unwanted people or objects in the background or even digitally transport ourselves to a whole different place.
We’ll do these things to make our photos look as good as they can and to remove distractions. The better photographs look, the more likely people will be more to look at them.
Why should Audio be any different?
I have often discussed with musician friends why the default reaction of many of us is that editing audio is somehow cheating. I hear things like ‘I don’t like to edit as I want it to sound ‘natural’.
Yet, just like what a camera lens sees, a microphone doesn’t experience a room in the same way we do.
Our ears are constantly moving. We have two of them. Our brains combine everything we hear into a remarkably convincing picture of the performance.
A microphone captures only what reaches its diaphragm at a particular point in space.
This is precisely what professionally produced recordings seek to remedy. Nobody listens to a professional recording expecting it to be the raw output from a single microphone.
They will often use multiple microphones, all designed to capture a different element of the sound. Then, the results are loaded into ‘software’. Each audio file produced is skilfully mixed. The end result is a single, beautifully balanced track that we are able to listen to.
This is where I feel that when we rely on ‘point and shoot’ audio we are doing ourselves, and those who spend the time to listen to us, a disservice.
Restoring what was lost
Even when recordings are made in beautiful halls, engineers still refine the sound afterwards. Just look around next time you’re in a concert hall and try to count the number of microphones you see. If you’ve never done it before, you might be surprised.
Additionally, studio recordings are generally created in quite ‘sterile’ spaces. Walls and floors have have heavy acoustic treatment. They do this to ensure the maximum ‘clarity’ in the sound.
However, this has the downside that if left untreated, they might sound rather thin. The beautiful warmth that you might get in a proper concert hall is there.
Therefore, in a studio recording, room ambiance will be added back later. The sound will be treated to bring out the depth of the instrument and add reverberation and warmth.
Why wouldn’t we add some reverberation back on a recording created in our lounge?
After all, we don’t seem to consider it cheating that professionals will go to these lengths.
The good news
We are living in a fantastic age where we can achieve amazing things that, even in my childhood, would have been impossible to any but the very privileged few.
Just like we can perform almost miracles with photos using nothing more than our phones, we can do many things with audio too.
Even better, we don’t need lots of expensive equipment to do this. You will find lots of ideas of great recording equipment set ups – from the simplest to slightly more involved.
However, just like getting a good result in a photo often means being very subtle in what we do with it (unless we really want it to look ‘fake), the same is true for Audio.
The encouraging thing is that these techniques are no longer reserved for professional recording studios. Today, anyone with a computer can use the same principles to help recordings sound more natural, balanced and engaging.
That’s exactly what I explore in my GarageBand for Classical Musicians course…
Also, if you’d like to explore more recording ideas, you’ll find many more articles in my guide on How to Record Your Piano at Home.
