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The Mapleshade Method
Low Tech/High-Fidelity Recordings
by Bill Shoemaker

But Sprey's Mapleshade recordings are excellent, featuring a crisp, live sound that bursts from the 0s and 1s encoded on CDs; Live At Ethell's (Mapleshade 56292) by tenor titan Clifford Jordan won the 1991 Crown Microphone Award for Best Professional Sound. Sprey, who gained much inside-the-Beltway notoriety during the 1980s as a defense analyst arguing against the more-sophisticated-is-better mindset of the military-industrial complex, bucks the establishment when it comes to recording music.

"In general, I don't care about measurements at all," Sprey said during a break in a recent session for pioneering third-stream pianist Ran Blake's Ellington's Attic. "I could care less about frequency response, signal-to-noise ratios, and so on. What I care about is how it sounds."

Sprey's microphone of choice is Crown's extremely responsive PZM, a palm-sized, plate-mounted unit. He centers one on each outside face of a V-shaped plexiglass baffle to approximate the pickup pattern of the human ear. The PZM's stock power supply/transformer box is replaced by two nine-volt batteries and a passive response-shaping network, which are spliced into the mic line to the preamps to prevent distortion. He keeps cable lengths in his system under 25 feet to minimize signal loss. The baffle is attached to a modified mic stand, which, for the Blake session - a quartet rounded out by electric guitar, acoustic bass, and drums - is placed in the curve of Sprey's restored 1911 Steinway Model O, whose soundboard is positioned in the middle of the 15x20x10-foot studio. (Sprey removed the Steinway's lid and casters for a better sound.)

The musicians are then placed about the studio for the best balance. Guitarist David Fiuczynski is seated at the end of the piano, but the house's tube amp is placed about 10 feet from the mic baffle. The amp's also weighed down with lead, Sprey's cure-all for absorbing vibrations. Bassist Ben Allison is placed in the reverb-rich hall with a PZM Sprey has modified by removing the tiny diaphragm from the stock enclosure, resulting in an evan faster response that better conveys the attack of the strings and the bass' woody tone. An adjustable plywood reflector fastened to a rod running between two boom stands is placed over drummer Paul Murphy. A small circular mirror mounted on the reflector allows Sprey, using a flashlight, to determine the best angle for direct reflection of the drum kit to the PZMs; the reflector was designed to give drums increased presence, but is also gives them unexpected warmth, and the cymbals extra definition.

Sprey runs his system completely unbalanced, contrary to standard engineering practice, convinced that the transformers involved with balanced lines degrade sound quality. For this same reason, he doesn't use a mixing-board, bypassing the many amplification stages the signal has to snake through to accomplish all the receives, sends, pans, and EQs contained in each channel. Instead, he uses the absolute minimum of amplification - battery-powered preamps armed with only gain controls.

Sprey uses an almost-unknown Sony professional tape recorder - the model number is his only trade secret. Unlike most machines, Sprey's machine doesn't cut off the upper-band limit at the usual 20,000 to 25,000 hz. This machine has very high limits - 42,000 hz; subsequently, the signal-to-noise ratio isn't as hot as other professional machines, but Sprey swears by it. His tape machine is far from stock, however. Several rolling elements were removed from the tape path; the resonating tape-path cover also went. Major motor and capstan mounts were laminated in lead to eliminate resonances, heavy castings ring like a bell, and the vibration feeds down the capstan and onto the tape. Sprey has also replaced passive components with audiophile-quality condensers and resistors. He's aiming for totally battery-powered electronics in his tape machine; the noise of normal A/C power audibly impacts master tapes.

"I record as hot as I can get without distortion in order to avoid having to use any noise reduction. This technique is so important because there's such a loss of quality, particularly transient impact, when you use noise reduction. You lose so much pluck in the bass, and so much of the percussive sound of a piano hammer, that I'd rather take the risk of recording very hot and avoiding noise reduction. So far, it's worked: even on CDs, where tape hiss is very evident, I've had no complaints about tape hiss on my recordings."

Sprey's standard post-production procedure begins with rough editing and trial sequencing to save digital studio time, as well as test changes in level and left/right balance. Then, it's off with his tapes and machine to Digital Domain in New York, which has a custom-designed, 128-times oversampling analog-to-digital machine. Sprey thinks their machine best preserves the warmth and the room ambiance of an analog recording for CDs.

"Separate from this technical perfectionism is a vastly more important set of qualities at Mapleshade - that's how people feel in the studio," explains Sprey. "The first and most important thing about the room is that musicians are able to see and hear each other. It's not a dead room lined with Sonex and isolation booths. The second most important thing in the room is the windows. It's amazing how many musicians like to look out the windows, because a black, foam-like room without windows can be an extremely hostile environment. The third most important thing here is that musicians set the schedule here. There's no producer watching the clock, muttering about "time is money" and asking for three more takes before midnight."

August 1992