Recording the vocal lines for Miss Saigon!

Phew... a long day of home recording today! As I had written about yesterday, my wife's choirs have moved online for rehearsals. This means that they need some recordings to practice their parts by themselves, as the online rehearsals make it much more difficult to have focused group practice. So, if they come better prepared, it all runs much smoother!

I had already recorded a number of the choir pieces earlier in the year... it is a choir that does mostly Broadway musicals and that sort of thing... so, the musical language is a touch different to what I'm used to! That said, it is the sort of music that I really enjoyed playing when I was studying at university... and I have played in musicals before, so it is a style that is in my head lurking around somewhere!

On the left, you see the laptop that is feeding the piano accompaniament part that my wife had already recorded into the wireless headphones on my head.... the music is being recorded in chunks and I will stitch them together later in the week. I'm not confident enough that I can do a single take of 10 minutes of unfamiliar music... much as I would prefer to! I would have to stitch together the 4 SATB parts anyway...

I've chosen to use a modern viola for this project, rather than a violin. The viola has the range to cover all the parts whilst the violin would be unable to cover the lower two parts. Even still, with the viola, there are a couple of spots where I will have to do an octave transposition down in the editing as I run out of lower range for a couple of notes! It's nice to be playing this particular instrument again, as I'm primarily a Baroque instrument player.. and so this instrument only really gets an outing once every few months at best! It is butt-ugly... but makes the most sonorous sound!

Mostly, the recording was going quite smoothly and I was really getting into the music... I didn't know the music to Miss Saigon before this. My wife also didn't before playing this with the choir... and it made her curious to learn more about the Vietnam War... spoiler, it wasn't anything like the musical!

There was one little section that had an annoyingly tricky little rhythm for one single bar... you can see that I've had about 17 tries at it... and managed about 3 decent versions. In the end it wasn't that difficult, but it is the sort of thing where you get stuck... I nailed it after walking away and doing something else for while! Half the battle is in the mind... and how it plays tricks on you when you are trying to do something well!

... however, as I was nearing the end... I was starting to find it quite difficult to fit with the piano after a particular tempo change. It was really puzzling me, as I really though that I was really screwing something up...

However, in the end... after a few failed attempts and wondering why the hell I was being so retarded... it turned out that my wife had accidentally slotted in several pages of music from Aladdin! I hadn't noticed because the keys were the same, and the page numbers were the same as well!

Sadly, it also meant that I lost the time to finish it as I needed to run out to go and teach... I will be able to finish the recording in the morning. I should only need half an hour... and then it will be fun and games with the laptop and the editing software!

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