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Woodshed
MASTER CLASS
BY FRED BREITBERG
MICHAEL JACKSON
Fred Breitberg
An Engineer’s Approach to
Modern Big Band Recording
There is a robust big band recording world that exists outside of the
major centers of Los Angeles, New York and London. This article
will attempt to provide a glimpse into this world from my hometown,
Chicago.
It takes an incredible commitment to be a professional musician in
the Chicago area. There is no scoring work for film or television. There
is very little record company work that calls for legitimate, professional,
sight-reading musicians. The amount of advertising work that exists in
Chicago that used to rely on the professional, sight-reading musician has
dwindled, especially due to the proliferation of producers who use sampled
instruments in their compositions.
So, how do these musicians stay relevant and professional? They work
as educators, play the Broadway shows that come to town, perform in
jobbing bands and participate in the wide variety of big band entities that
exist in the Chicago area.
These big bands typically play only about once a month at a nightclub.
This, however, affords the participating musicians a format where
they can exercise their sight-reading chops and play great music. It is a
place where musicians can compose and arrange their own work as well
as play arrangements (or interesting rearrangements) of the classics.
In order to make a recording, these big bands must cobble together
some kind of budget and accommodate the wide variety of musicians’
schedules. Due to the self-funded nature of these projects, the budgets
are generally small. They have to cover the musicians’ budget, the tech
budget and generally the manufacturing costs. Once the project is complete,
they must find a label to release the project, or self-release. Then
there’s the challenge of promotion costs, sales, marketing, etc. It is a
daunting commitment.
This is the environment within which I work. To respect and honor
that commitment, I have to be in a position to deliver major-label-quality-sounding
product—product that can compete side-by-side with the
incredible product that is being recorded, mixed and mastered in stateof-the-art
studios in L.A., New York and elsewhere by seasoned engineers
with access to world-class microphone collections.
What I have to do is provide a recording environment that is the
equivalent of these large pro rooms with great mic collections. In
Chicago, the traditional recording environments that exist are basically
medium-sized rooms. While they will fit an entire big band, the setups
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