Blue Coast Records - A deep dive into our Blue Coast Artists in DSD -What does it mean to record “live without headphones?”

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Suggested listening
Track 01 - Looking for a Home - Blue Coast Collection - Keith Greeninger and Dayan Kai
https://bluecoastmusic.com/blue-coast-collection

For more than 40 years owning a studio, I have recorded artists in the traditional way. Meaning - the instruments are isolated in a room or baffles put up so that each instrument’s sound doesn’t leak into the other instruments microphones.

This method is now the ‘accepted’ way to record. It means the musicians can’t hear each other and must use heaphones. The good reasons to do this are:

1. If a musician makes a mistake, you can record only their parts

2. You can get a better sound for the instrument because there’s no leaking from other instruments

3. A musician can do “overdubs” of themselves for additional parts…. like more background vocals

4. You can use a click track so the musicians don’t speed up or slow down

5. You can use plugins to correct the pitch and rhytm if you need.

It sounds ideal, right? Fix everything and get great sound with expensive microphones! And for the first 20 years of my recording career, I learned every trick in the book to make giant sounding tracks. And it was FUN, too. Five guitarists on every song, big drums and lots of percussion, background vocals galore.

And then one day, I went into the recording room to rehearse the musicians who were sitting in a circle on the floor. The drummer was playing on the back of an Ampex tape box. The bass player was unamped playing acoustic. The vocalist was playing guitar and singing.

The band had never met before. Total strangers listening to each other’s groove and intention of the song. Their was emotion, dynamics, story and great intonation.

I thought to myself…. I should be recording this NOW. But it wasn’t what I was hired to do. I never forgot that session. A year later, I was calling all the great musicians to come to the studio and record without headphones, live in the same room while myself and Jean Claude Reynaud figured out how to mic these incredible musicians.

That became Blue Coast Collection. It was the first of many compilations using the same recording technique.

https://bluecoastmusic.com/blue-coast-collection

Here are more collections we’ve recorded

https://bluecoastmusic.com/blue-coast-collection-2
https://bluecoastmusic.com/blue-coast-collection-3
https://bluecoastmusic.com/blue-coast-collection-4
https://bluecoastmusic.com/blue-coast-collection-5

And the good news is Collection 6 is in the works with new tunes not yet released!

Leave a comment or write to us at support@bluecoastmusic.com

Enjoy your music!

Cookie Marenco
Founder and Producer
Blue Coast Records and Music

Put it in shuffle, turn off the the default compression of your computer and let it roll for days as background music while you work and play. Enjoy! Remember - Qobuz and Tidal offer high resolution audio for the best streaming sound. We’ve assembled our Blue Coast Records playlist on a few platforms and called it Blue Coast Radio.

Qobuz - Blue Coast Records Radio
https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/27245691

Tidal - Blue Coast Records Radio
https://tidal.com/playlist/089ec3a9-f9c9-4cff-8add-47cb4aaa18e2

YouTube - Blue Coast Records Radio
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiWDrjNeis2WAmebn74RDBKMUjKc8Hkn2