RECORDING

For the recording, we arrived early at the venue so that we could start setup before the choir members arrived. The easiest way to describe the layout is if you were to think of the hall in a portrait layout, we had initially intended to record from the back and have the performers positioned at the door. However, due to the size of the choir this wouldn’t be practical so we changed the layout so the choir was in a landscape position rather than portrait. We had brought an equipment list with us so we could check off what we had and where to set it up. We all worked together to connect the uTrack recorder, Audient pre-amps and laptop together and set the mics up in a Fukada tree array as well as 4 spot mics. We used a measuring tape to ensure we had accurate spacing between the microphones in order to capture audio accurately using this technique.  The image of the array below details the measurements that were required:

We knew that if these measurements were too large for the space to half each to make it work however we didn’t need to as after our tech recce we knew this would work.

The 4 of us then worked together to make sure the cables were plugged into the correct inputs and then performed a soundcheck. After doing this the levels on ProTools looked really good with a nice, strong green signal coming through. We set each track to record enable and decided we would record the entire session as it would be good to have some of the talking and interaction between the choir and choir master as she was wanting to create a promotional video for the choir. They sang a few snippets of different songs that we knew would work really well with the 5.1 aspect required for us as there is parts of the song where it moved between sections or there were 2 parts being sung simultaneously. We had noticed at one point that the interface was peaking red with the signal coming in but after looking at ProTools, there was no evidence of this or any distortion/clipping there. We had tried during the soundcheck to listen through headphone however this was hard to hear with the choir singing. In hindsight, we should have asked the choir to pause for a moment so we could check the recording was ok. Another problem we encountered was that ProTools stopped recording halfway through. After checking the laptop, there was no storage left on the drive intended for college students to use. I noticed that there was space left on the actual laptops memory so we copied our session into there and we were able to finish our recording. We all worked very well as a team in setting up, recording and packing down in a timely, professional and efficient manner.

I had mentioned that I intended to record a 360 video alongside a binaural mix to complement this. However, there wasn’t enough space with the size of our layout and to not waste time on this and capture the best audio we could I decided against it.