Recording Classical Music

CHAPTER 9 Reverberation

In the world of recording, many engineers, particularly classical recordists, like to capture sound the way it occurs naturally in a reverberant space, while others, especially in the pop/rock field, choose to record direct sound with as little influence from the room as possible. But because listeners prefer to hear music in a naturally ambient setting, pop/rock recordists regularly add synthetic reverberation during the mixing stage. Consequently, virtually all recordings include both direct and reverberated sound so that the music sounds pleasant in all listening environments, for as Alexander Case (2007: 263) suggests, “the most important reverberation exists within the recording, not the playback space.”

With the ...