[ David Kelzenberg wrote in 170815 MMDigest:

> I would love to buy a CD of their arrangements, in halfway decent
> sound, on a good instrument!

Would that it were that easy!  A casual recording made on a cell phone
or camera, or even a handheld MP3 recorder is fine for getting the gist
of what an arrangement sounds like, but it won't produce a recording
that you really want to listen to that reflects well on the organ and
arrangement.

I fear the huge number of really bad recordings of mechanical music
on YouTube, etc., are contributing to the disinterest in them and
perpetuation of complaints of their un-musicality.  (I'm guilty of
posting some of them.)  Flaws are most definitely amplified through
the recording process -- more so if you listen with headphones.

It is very easy to spend several thousand dollars to make a good
recording and have it professionally mastered and pressed.  Then
you have 500 or 1000 disks, which is enough to last a _long_ time.
(You can press fewer CD copies, but the cost per copy goes up fast.
Computer reproduced CDs just don't work well enough to sell to the
public -- you end up with angry people on the phone wanting to know
why you sent them a CD that doesn't work in their device.)

You probably want the tuner there for at least two days: the day before
to rough tune and correct any faults, and then during the recording day
to fine tune and touch up the tuning as environmental conditions
change.  You'll need your recording engineer, with his or her $10,000's
worth of pro level microphones and recorders.

If you have a larger organ you need to secure a large venue where you
can get out of the weather, away from ambient noise, and with enough
space for the organ to reverb off the walls in a pleasing way, i.e.,
just a little to provide "presence".

Finally, there are the copyright challenges.  In the USA for anything
published after 1923 you need a license for mechanical reproduction
of each song, including each song separately in a medley.  If you go
through the Harry Fox Agency (HFA) it will cost you about $60 per song,
so that's another $1200 for 20 songs on your 500 CDs.  If your arranger
wants a royalty that will be in addition.  Tracking down some titles
and composers can take many hours if, as for much of our music, they
are relatively obscure and not in the HFA on-line database.

That's more than you wanted to know, I'm sure, but making a decent CD
or other recording is a big undertaking.  Even when you do all of the
above you can still fail because of small things that go overlooked or
unheard on recording day.

Roger Wiegand
Wayland, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.carouselorgan.com/