About
Musician, engineer and producer Steve Carr is the owner of Hit and Run Recording, an audio recording studio located in Rockville MD. In business for over 30 years, Steve has recorded many of the top bands and artists of all styles of music in the Washington DC area and is credited with over 440 releases on Discogs.com. He has also digitally re-mastered countless hit recordings by the likes of Springsteen, Madonna, Prince, Tom Petty and Aerosmith for Warner Communications and received a platinum album award (over one million copies sold) for the Time-Life Classic Rock collection.
It is an honor to have Hit and Run Recording and my name in the liner notes alongside some of my all-time favorite bands and songs - from Aerosmith, to Hendrix, Cline and Williams, the Supremes, Springsteen, to the Sex Pistols!
It was also an interesting juxtaposition hearing such recordings by day on time-aligned monitors and then working with countless unsigned bands and artists by night. Things became real apparent to me about what make a recording have a timeless quality to it - and I did the Time-Warner gig for seven years! I also appreciated that I had use of latest technology at that time - two Sony DAT machines - digital! I was always working on ways to make better recordings.
Look-Ahead Dynamics in 1995!
For example, in 1995, I wrote an article about a signal path I designed to get better mixes with live drum kits. I had been recording drum kits with this process for years and felt it was worth letting other recordists know about it. This signal path was built around the fact that an electrical representation of a sound travels through a wire much faster than sound waves do through the air.
This "pre-triggering" a tom's noise gate gives a mix the benefit of having no tom "unintentional ring-out" and yet this path (that employs a contact mic routed to the tom's noise gate side chain input) retains all the nuance and attack of even weak drum hits. The first magazine I sent it to (after receiving permission) never responded to my cordial follow up calls. The second magazine (EQ Magazine) subsequently published the article months later in 1995.
When I was considering getting ADATs in 1995, I knew the format would save clients tape costs, but I was concerned about their sound quality due to what I read about it in industry trade magazines. My contact at EQ said if I ever had any more articles, let them know. I subsequently contacted them about an idea I had for a CD called The A/B CD. The publisher liked the idea, wanted me to make an A/B comparison of the Mackie board I was going to buy and an SSL board, and the publisher told me the name of the person who was going to be contacting me. That person left a message and call back number on my recording studio's answering machine. I returned the call a few times and left messages, but the gentleman from EQ Magazine never got back to me.
Three ADAT recorders
(24 tracks)
In 1996, Hit and Run Recording's new Mackie mixing board and ADAT digital recording system was installed and operating alongside the analog recorder I purchased in the 80s. As previously mentioned, I decided to engineer an "A/B" comparison of the two systems as a quality control measure for my studio and for The A/B CD. For that recording, I got the go ahead from Billy Kemp (the producer) and Bill Mott (the artist) to record one of the song's on Bill's album "Dancing With Angels" using both systems. The analog/digital A/B recording of Bill's song "The Price You Must Pay" ended up being Track 6 on The A/B CD.
Because all of the components in a recording's signal path interact to affect the end result, I knew early on that the complete signal path needed to be presented using controlled, repeatable methodologies in order to make The A/B CD a valid and useful audio educational resource.
I set myself up for a significant engineering mountain to climb.
Besides the engineering complexity, I had to totally re-record some of the tracks because they weren’t good enough musicianship wise (e.g. it's difficult to focus on listening to the sound quality of different pieces of gear if the singer is too far off pitch) Because of all such things, it took me five years to complete The A/B CD!
Steve has been involved in audio engineering education since 2001, when he released a CD of A/B audio comparisons called “The A/B CD.” Since then, The A/B CD has been on the front cover of Electronic Musician magazine and reviewed in numerous audio industry publications.
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While thousands of students have studied The A/B CD at a top university over the years, audio CD players and computer CD drives were being phased out. Another issue was the 16 page CD booklet only enough space to list the 53 tracks, their A/B counter numbers and one line descritptions of components being compared.
Steve has subsequently published an interactive WAV audio production course on PDF called “The Origins of Sound Qualities.” It is 1.3 gigabyte, 406 pages and based on WAV files digitally transfered from The A/B CD with an addtional 700 meg of WAV files and high resolution color graphics. An online course on the subject of audio production with videos is scheduled for 2023.
A/B is a trademark registered to Steve Carr
