It is so satisfying to take your bounces, drop them into itunes and then sync them onto your iphone.
After three straight days of mixing, I finally have some rough drafts to listen to. I'm already finding things that need to be remixed and/or fixed, but it's a good start!
Some notes on the workflow today...
Friday, May 27th
Adding vocal support tracks and mixdown
Some of my favorite pieces from the show have choral background vocals. While we got a very good sound in performances, I just wasn't feeling it in the recordings and decided to add some support vocals.
I do this type of work quite a bit: I constantly keep a microphone on a stand right at my desk extended over the keyboard so I don't have to get up or move to record vocals or guitars (I also keep a 1/4 input for electric instruments within reach). Since these are only support vocals, they don't need to be searingly hot takes.
I then open a PDF of the sheet music and keep it open over my session:
Open session with PDF of sheet music
(made in Sibelius) open over it
I then site read the tracks right in without printing it out the music, or even getting up from my desk. A second Monitor comes in handy as well:
My very messy desk, computer
Shure SM52 and monitor.
I dropped in 6 vocal tracks (3 parts - 2 Women's parts and 1 Mans) in 4 pieces of music. The actors from the show are clearly the present sound, but the whole thing just sounds a little warmer and bigger.
Usually when I track vocals (like the original demos' I did for the cast when I was writing it in LA and they were rehearsing it in NYC), I have Sibelius (my notation software) "Hot Synced" to Logic, meaning they both
Play
together and moves through the music in real time. But that's for another Blog.
I then took all the bounces and put them into a new session so I could do some editing (a few tracks needed to be cut together) and put a little mastering and balancing on everything.
Next is figuring out final mixes, mastering and then a way to distribute this nicely to the cast. I'm trying to find a free service to upload music that will play in an embeddable player (so maybe I can even post the music here).
-c