Live Production in Salsa Dura: The Case of the Congahead YouTube Channel

‪This article focuses on New York’s Puerto Rican salsa (‪‪salsa dura‪‪). The first part shows that while ‪‪salsa dura‪‪ may have been the object of a strategy of authenticity through performance, it is also inseparable from a certain culture of recording. The second part of the article sheds light on some of the production processes underlying live performance. The analyses presented are based on a series of interviews conducted between January and July 2024 with professional musicians, composers, arrangers, producers and sound engineers in the field. This section focuses on the YouTube channel ‪‪Congahead‪‪, which has been broadcasting live sessions of Latin music since 2006. From the point of view of the channel’s in-house sound engineer, it looks at the challenges of miking, i.e. the choice and placement of microphones. The case of ‪‪Congahead‪‪ shows that salsa recorded live is not opposed to salsa recorded in separate layers (re-recording), in the sense that the former is no less “produced” or more “immediate” than the latter: its “authenticity” is just as constructed.‪