Ångström Brass Recording Session Wrap
Ångström Brass just finished recording for our debut album. Some thoughts on recording, and the differences between performing live and performing for a recording:
We record ourselves at every rehearsal and had a pretty good idea going into the studio of what we could expect from ourselves. We rehearse in a friendly (but not overly wet) acoustic, though, and the studio was very dry.
We also went with a full-group recording vs. any isolation, which means anything we’re splicing has has match across the whole group. And with brass quartet, everyone has an exposed part all the time. Needless to say, we wound up doing a lot of retakes for details on timing and intonation.
We recorded over the course of three months (6 days of which had studio time) and we improved a lot at the skill set of performing for the “tape” between the first session and the last.
Top 3 Things We Did Right
Knew our music before going in, to a point where tweaking things wasn’t a big deal.
Had a great producer and engineer.
Took the time to get mics positioned right, including multiple options for an offstage effect.
3 Things We Did Wrong (Number 1 Will Surprise You)
Scheduled with the studio before confirming our producer’s availability — don’t try to self-produce, we pretty much burned most of our first day with this one.
We moved some resonating instruments out of the room for a cleaner sound, but didn’t realized the click track was coming through. More wasted time on day one, see above.
Planning to do the whole album at once. It was a lot to put on the plate, especially with the diversity of our repertoire. Going forward we’ll probably do a couple pieces every couple months vs. everything at the same time.
What I Learned
You can never be too prepared, or too strong on fundamentals. If you’re getting frustrated/burned out/in your head about a certain section, just move on and come back to it later. Always have something else ready to record in case you’re running ahead of schedule. If you’re not the most important thing going on at the time, that’s the time to be perfect; you don’t want to ruin a take on a background part, or have your mistake left in. Consistency and clarity are key. Be flexible, because something that comes across great in a live performance may not work in the studio.
[We’ll see how I feel about the recording of J.S. Bach’s Contrapunctus VIII. I had a bit of a cold that day and was taking Mucinex DM to manage the symptoms. I think we’ll be going with our first take of the high note lick I’d been obsessing over for months. Overall I think I played well that day, but we’ll see how it sounds on tape.]