St. Laurence's Choir Recording

As spoken about in prior documentation (click here), Joe Hayes and I were set out to record, mix and master some local church choir talent. The most time consuming aspect of this project was definitely planning and communication. I took the roll of project manager and left it upon myself to scout and organise the date, location and choir we were to record.

Planning

I spent a number of weeks researching choirs that would be suiting fit for the project; a community choir, preferably one that doesn't have much (or any) recording experience was ideal. I came across 3 local choirs that fit the category and had a relatively good standard of singing within their group. The only downfall was the communication, I sent multiple emails and tried to make a number of phone calls but I wasn't receiving much of a response from any of the groups. It got to week 8 and I still hadn't locked in a date or a time, so out of the stress of the moment I contacted my old high school; St. Laurence's College. I contacted the administration via email asking if it was possible to record the boys choir, they referred me to the head of music; Dr. Anthony Young. From here I started to liaise with Dr. Young about dates and times to record the choir. Having to receive approval from administration with every step and idea we came up with, definitely made the process longer and more difficult, but it also made sure that everything was set in stone and as organised as possible.

Originally I had planned with Dr. Young to record the choir at their graduation ceremony with a live audience. This would have been ideal for me as I wanted to capture recordings of the audience and implement them into a 5.1 mix alongside footage of the ceremony. I got in contact with the AV manager for the school to see if it was possible to run a multi track recording out of the 16 channel mixing desk in their 1500 seat auditorium. He eventually got back to me saying that we are unable to record on the night of graduation as the production was already on a busy time schedule and that his mixing desk can only run a stereo output for recording. The stereo output wouldn't have been the end of the world for us as we could record straight into a mobile recording device, which I mentioned, but he was adamant that we couldn't record on the night.

Once again we we're left without a time or date....

Luckily Dr. Young was still keen to get recordings done of the boys choir so we figured out a reasonable time the following week to record during one of the choirs practise sessions. Perfect, we have a new time and a new date. This date was a Monday morning at 6:15am. Not only was Dr. Young keen for recording, he also wanted video footage with a 5.1 mix for educational and promotional purposes. I told him "not a problem", I got in contact with a film student via the SAE interdisciplinary facebook page, he was keen to film the choir and put together videos for myself to incorporate the 5.1 mix into.

Date, time and location are all locked in, and now I've even managed to organise a film student to be apart of the production.

In between all of the liaising and planning, there were a few key things that I needed to know before arriving on location to record; Where is the venue, how many people are in the choir, how much time will we have to record and how many songs do you plan to perform. I received all of the information except the amount of people that would be in the choir. This was something that if know, would have made the session much easier to plan for.

In the pre-production document we listed the equipment that was needed and I had gone ahead to book out all of the audio gear 2 weeks in advance. I booked them that much in advance to ensure that we would have everything that we needed. On the day of my booking, I arrived at SAE to collect the audio gear and it just so happened that a member of staff had also booked some of the items out and had them in their possession. I acknowledge that this may not have been my fault, as I was told that I had made the booking first and that the member of staff didn't check both booking pages, but as the project manager it still fell back on me if things didn't go according to plan. For instance, I had made a booking for the Rode NT5 Condenser microphones, and because they were taken we had to go with the Sennheiser e614 pair. Not only that, I was told at the last minute that there will be an organ playing while the choir sings, so I grabbed two SM57 microphones for safety.

I still hadn't received an email letting me know how many people will be in the choir on the day of recording; hoping that we had the right amount of gear.

Recording

On the day of recording, Joe and I met in the carpark of the school at 6am sharp (expecting the film student to arrive sometime before the recording session started), we met Dr. Young at his office and he took us to the chapel where we will be recording. The plan for the morning was that he was going to practise with the boys choir for 30 minutes in a seperate room to warm their voices up and go over a couple of the songs and then they would enter the chapel to record. This plan worked out well for both parties as it gave Joe and I substantial time to set up and test all the microphones prior to recording. The set up that Joe and I went with was a basic choir recording set up that I had found through research online:

• ORTF set up in the centre

• 2x outriggers

• 2x overheads

Once all the microphones were in position and and plugged in, the recording device channels were appropriately panned and cable management was under control, we then moved on the testing the microphones. To do this I got joe to put headphones on and stand by the recording device, I then placed a phone in the centre of the sound field we are going to record and told joe to balance the channels in accordance to the volume of the phone. If any thing was off or angled incorrectly, it was my job to adjust the positioning of the microphones.

We had everything set up, tested and ready to go, and we found ourselves waiting 15 minutes longer than the initial 30 minutes we had to set up. This was a big game changer for the session because we were now extremely limited for time to capture all of the songs. The teaching staff of the school had a staff meeting in the chapel directly after our session, this meant that we could not go past the allocated time given to us. With the choir being 15 minutes late, we now have 20 minutes to record, not 35. Great...

I must say though, Joe and I finished bumping in all of our gear with time to spare, we were very efficient on the day and didn't waste any time. Unfortunately, when the choir had arrived to the chapel with Dr. Young, I was questioned by him about where the film student was as he had not arrived yet. I had to inform him that I haven't heard from him at any point in the morning and was unsure if he was going to make it. This was another one of those situations where I knew it wasn't my fault that the film student wasn't there, but again, as project manager, it fell back on me to liaise and plan this entire production. This was also a big let down for the audio side of things because now I won't have the footage needed to mix the recordings into 5.1 surround sound.

Miking up the organ wasn't a priority for us, this is because the overall aesthetic for the project was to be an intimate choir recording that's able to be played at masses and churches that may not have access to a gospel choir to sing hymns with. Whether there was an organ in the distant background or not was irrelevant, just as long as the vocal recording was clearly audible and words able to be articulated on playback. This was definitely our key focus because the choir itself was a little bit flat, syllables were out of time for much of the recordings, some members of the choir could even be heard singing the wrong words.....

All of this could have been corrected and re-recorded if we had the original time allocated, but having 20 minutes and only being able to do one take for each song really limited us and lowered the potential for the recordings.

As the choir were performing, we monitored the sound quality through stereo headphones that were connected to the recording device. All of a sudden, at one point during the recording one of the overhead microphones lost nearly all clarity; there was a loud and overpowering noise flaw on the channel. Unfortunately, due to the time restraints, we didn't have enough time to stop the recording, solve the issue (I believe it was a fault with an XLR cable that had been stood on by a choir member) and re-record the track, we just had to go with it.

it seems like everything that's going wrong can go wrong.

Mixing

When it came to mixing the audio, the first thing that needed to be done was to eliminate all noise flaws from the recordings; we were recording with 2x Zoom H6's with microphones that were in a room full of ducted air-conditioning. I managed to do this using a noise reduction tool made by iZotope, called Spectral De-noise. What this plug-in does is it analyses the sonic characteristics of any chosen frequencies that run through it and then removes them from the audio file. Compare the two versions below.

Track 1: Raw Recording Before Reduction

Track 1: Raw Recording After Reduction

After all tracks were cleaned up, I then began to EQ and apply spacial dynamics to the channels. I didn't want to add a large amount of reverbs or delays because of the natural reverb that was captured in the recordings from the chapel, and because we wanted an intimate aesthetic, for others to listen to. Once I began to listen to the playback of the songs I noticed one huge flaw in the recordings; there was a sharp crackle that occurred during randomised times throughout most of the songs. This was extremely frustrating, because it completely ruined the recordings for some of the channels. The only way I could think of fixing this issue without removing the channel itself, was to locate the key frequencies and EQ them out, so I did. These crackles were so noisey that I ended up having to remove almost all frequencies above 6kHz, which is a crazy amount to remove in a vocal recording. To counter balance the loss of frequency, I added more reverb to instil the impression of natural frequency loss over distance; the further something is away, the less high frequencies you'll perceptually hear. This fixed the issue (somewhat) but directly countered the original aesthetic choice. I chose to stick with my decision and choose quality of aesthetic; I'd much rather have a choir spaced out in a large space than an intimate recording that has a number of flaws. I then mastered each track to -14LUFs and sent them back to Dr. Young to do with as he (the school) pleases.

Conclusion

Looking back on this project, I can definitely say I learnt a lot in regards to management (especially HR management) and planning. Joe was an excellent assistant for this project and I'm very glad he opted to get involved and assist me on the day of recording. I would have been under a lot more stress setting up myself and I definitely wouldn't have been able to test the microphones prior to the start of recording. If I was to be given the choice of aesthetic and not have the freedom to create my own idea of the project, I would have been in trouble. Even though the recording's aren't as intimate as initially planned, the quality was held to a high standard and we had to compensate to do so, which I would do again. I definitely would like to do more projects like this in the future, especially with Dr. Young at St. Laurence's. If I am able to put myself in a position to obtain more audio contracts from the school and their production means that I'll have more hands on experience to help build my project management and HR skillset.