John Bradley wrote:

>I hate to tell you but just about every modern recordings is cut and
>pasted.  Pitch vibrato and echo are changed numerous times.  Everyone
>cheats.

It's not "cheating." It is simply the way things are done in the
professional recording world.  It's not unique to digital recordings,
either, it's just easier with digital.  Before, engineers had to do what
is known as "splicing" meaning that the analog tape was literally cut
with scissors and pasted back together.

There are a few reasons for this.  First of all, a recording is not simply
a concert performance, it must be *perfect*.  So you record a section till
it is just right, then you paste it to the next section.  Humans simply
can't play perfectly every note all the time.  Even if every note is
correct, there are subtleties of nuance, inflection, attack, dynamic,
that you want to be absolutely right before you let it into the world.

Secondly, just to clarify things, pitch is generally not touched, and
certainly not vibrato.  Echo, or reverb, certainly is, especially if the
recording is done in the studio which by its design is almost devoid of
natural resonance.  Nowadays most people record in a natural space like
a concert hall or church to get natural reverb, but even then the sound
quality is tinkered with.

Thirdly, it is the nature of the industry that listeners expect a
note-perfect recording.  A live performance is another thing.  Some notes
will be out of tune even with the finest soloists.  You simply can't let
an out-of-tune note go through to the final product.

I have done many recordings in my career and not a single one was
done "live" without editing.  I know of no artist that considers this
"cheating".  As an example, there was a recent recording released of
Kremer/Maisky/Argerich playing Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky trios.  It
is billed as a live recording, but if you read the liner notes you will
find that after the concert the artists stayed in the hall until 5 in the
morning to make "fixes".

Just to give another example of this, when my group recently made a
recording, there was a section in the Shostakovich trio that the violin
plays a figure of eighth-note and two sixteenths four times cosecutively.
On the last repetition of this, the second sixteenth was slightly distorted
in tone.  In a live performance this would go unnoticed, but on a recording
it is a flaw.  So we stole a sixteenth from the previous bar, copied it,
and pasted it over the offending sixteenth.

Some might call this cheating, but there is nothing on our recording that
isn't our playing, that isn't a "live" performance.  It is simply the best
material strung together.

Allow me an analogy: If a novelist rewrites a paragraph, is it cheating?
If a painter slightly alters a color? Must films be made in a continuous
stream without turning off the camera? Was Beethoven cheating when he
worked and worked a passage to get the perfect version?

David Runnion
http://www.serafinotrio.com
http://mp3.com/serafinotrio