ACOUSTIC & FOLK RECORDING

Eastwood Records has worked on a number of acoustic recording projects with solo artists, singer songwriters and folk groups, including Stefano Giaccone, who fronted Italian 'hardcore folk' band Franti in the 1980s, alternative folk songwriter Joe Holtaway, world-fusion group Kabantu, Arabic soul singer Juliana Yazbeck and Hayward & Parsons, the unaccompanied folk duo who founded the British Pilgrimage Trust.

We can provide production and engineering for acoustic lineups with a variety of instruments, and are happy to arrange parts for guitar-based ensembles, string sections, woodwind and more. In terms of acoustics and workflow, location recording is the recommended format for these sorts of projects. A live room setup with good sight lines and sufficient time to establish a decent sound is key.

Analogue recording

Analogue warmth is often treated as the holy grail by contemporary folk and acoustic musicians. But what does this mean in practical terms? In our experience an 'analogue' recording philosophy is as much about microphone placement, gain staging and particular EQ and compression characteristics as old equipment and tracking to tape. These are all techniques that can all be carried out in the digital domain.

Classic microphones were designed to operate optimally with sufficient distance between the performer and capsule. As well as providing a well-balanced and rich sound, judicious microphone placement allows room acoustics to be part of the capture, which accounts for the 'roomy' sound of many postwar records. Pressure-operated omnidirectional microphones, used on classic 1960s British blues LPs but now out of favour in non-classical circles , enable the full audio bandwidth to be captured in all its glory.

More generally, recording on a digital system with generous headroom margins provides many of the sonic benefits associated with analogue audio. It reduces the risk of digital summing errors, leading to an open sound with untamed transients and dynamics.

If you’d like to discuss a recording project in more detail, we'd be delighted to hear from you: