Diary of a Musical Theatre Recording Session

[Freddy G]

Hi All,

In October of 2010 I was hired to produce a CD of an original cast recording of a new musical that was to make it's world debut on the stage in 2011.
Thought some here may be interested in looking at the behind the scenes nuts and bolts of a project like this.
This is a relatively simple production. Nine singers accompanied by 4 musicians. But what made it tricky was the fact that everything was recorded live off the floor in one room. No overdubs. The idea was to try to capture the immediacy of live theatre. But this meant that none of the usual post tracking "fixes" could be applied because of the bleed from the mics.
So it was a matter of capturing good takes, and that meant some solid rehearsal prior to recording.
Here are a few photos of the session.



These guys are the 2 composers, and there's me at the controls.








I chose this room for the recording because it is fairly large and sounds great. Before the session I had rugs brought in so I could arrange them in order to control the amount of reflection from the floor. All of the vocal mics were set up on the side of the room that had thick velvet curtains that were drawn...again to control reflections. For vocal mics I used 2 vintage AKG 414s, 2 AT 4050, 2 AT 4033 and for the main lead vocals I used a pair of tube mics I made.






I placed the guitarists and percussion on this side of the room. A bit more reflection here helped the acoustic instruments sound more lively. For the guitars I used a pair of vintage Neumann KM84s and also took DI signals onto seperate tracks.







On the percussion (congas, triangle, shakers) I used an vintage Reslo ribbon mic that I restored. Here's a link to see the restoration:

Reslo Mic Lives Again! - YouTube

Reslo Mic Lives Again! - YouTube

A shot from my point of view. I used Cubase 5 for recording software. The soundcard was an Echo Audiofire 12 running at 96k sampling rate/ 24 bit. All the mic pres were handmade by me. I had 10 channels of tube and 2 channels of solid state pres.

Organization is very important. You can see on my desk sheet music for each tune, and also track sheets on which I would make notes about each take.









A bit of background of the play.
The play is called Maria Severa, it was written about the legendary Portuguese singer in the early 1800s.
Severa is known as the mother of a singing style called "fado". Which in Portuguese means fate.
Maria is a poor prostitute in the bad part of Lisbon, but she gains fame by singing in the tavern. Armando the famous bullfighter falls in love with Maria and this causes problems between the families because he is an aristocrat and she is a whore. A sort of Romeo and Juliet thing.




Here are the actors who play Armando and Maria going over some vocal parts for the song "Wandering Moon/Starlight".





And here they are tracking the song, notice the corduroy slip covers on the music stands. That reduces reflections.




A photo from the stage production



The CD cover:



And here is the song called Wandering Moon/Starlight.

http://soundcloud.com/freddygabrsek/wandering-moon-starlight

[nicolasrivera]

That sounded beautiful Freddy, great job you did.

There is a string scratch at about 1:17 that is distractingly high in volume.

[Freddy G]

thanks Nic,
yes I am aware of that one. I manually reduced volume of many string scratches. Some were left in, just as a way to keep it real and not too slick and polished. There were times when even reducing the volume of the scratch could only go so far because the scratch would bleed into the other guitarist's mic...so I decided not to obsess about them.
There were also judgement calls on vocals overloading. On one occasion when the singer hit a really big crescendo, it went into clipping, but I decided to keep that take anyway because it was a fantastic take.

[weirdotis]

This is a great reference, Freddy. Sure looks like a heck of a lot of fun!