Stuff to know about the recording process

It is always an exciting and exhilarating process to listen to great musicians play your music for the first time, and I can’t wait to experience that on Monday (March 7) at the Tracking Room in Nashville.  Remember that we are streaming and you can watch it in HD quality (assuming your internet connection is good) all day long.

The link to the live stream is here: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/512638.  I encourage you to sign up for a free account with LiveStream right now and “follow” me, which will ensure you get reminded when the event starts.  It will also give you the ability to interact with us in the chat area.

Here are the people that you will see:

Musicians: The musicians are all union Nashville studio players (often known as the Nashville String Machine).  You will probably catch on that they are highly professional (not one will be a second late) and passionate about getting the music right (which they will all be sight-reading).  They will not be dressed up because there is no need for them to be and many of them will be on the quiet side, but they are all consummate professionals.

We are using somewhere around 30 musicians and 8 vocalists but they will not all be in the studio at the same time. The orchestration will be built in three steps: piano, strings, and woodwinds first, vocals second, and brass and percussion last.

Contractor: The person who is responsible for booking musicians is called the contractor.  The usual contractor for this kind of work is Carl Gorodetzky. He will probably pop in for a few minutes in the morning to make sure everything is fine but will not stay the whole day.

Session leader: This is the musician that is in charge of all the union musicians while in the studio. Normally, that is violinist Pam Sixfin.

Conductor: Steve Mauldin will be conducting. He will lead visually by waving his arms but you will also hear him counting softly into a microphone.  The vocal count is very important because it will be used later to add other instruments and also by me when I perform with these orchestrations later.

Engineer: The person at the big sound board will be Bob Clark, who is widely considered to be the best engineer for this kind of work in Nashville.  He engineered “Reflections on a Journey” for me as well. You will hear him interacting a lot with me and Steve and he is probably the most critical person in the room for keeping things moving efficiently so that we finish on time.

Second engineer: Bob will have at least one helper that will do everything from running errands to changing microphones. That person will also notate printed music with time codes that Bob will later use to do fixes.

And here are some common terms you will hear thrown around:

Downbeat: The start time of the day or session.

Scratch: When you hear that this an instrument is “scratch” or we are “scratching” something, that simply means that that instrument or vocalist is not being recorded for the final product.  For example, we may use a scratch vocal early in the day just to verify that we are not going to have problems when we add vocals for real later in the day.

Everything I am going to play is “scratch.” The only reason I am even playing is to help the musicians understand what I want from the music. We will not record the piano officially for these songs until my live taping in August.

Click or “on a click”: The studio term “click” simply refers to playing with a metronome. Most pop music is now recorded with a click because it keeps musicians together and makes fixes easy. In general, I don’t record with a click because I want more ability to use rubato. That brings its own set of challenges but we make it work with the help of Steve’s vocal count that I discussed earlier.

On Monday, we are probably only using a click on part of one song and all of another.

Fixes: After a song is recorded, you will start hearing musicians calling out fixes, which are places that they feel like they did not play well. They will call out bar numbers and it will be up to Bob to rerecord that spot for that musician or group of musicians.

“Doing a punch” or “punching in”: The way fixes are done is by punching in. Basically, Bob will play back the recording starting a few bars before a fix needs to occur and the musician will play along. At some spot, Bob will “punch them in” which means he will switch from playback to record mode. If done well, it is entirely seamless, but there is a real art to figuring out when to do the punch to make it sound right.

Stacking or “another pass”: These are terms used to describe the recording of some instruments multiple times to make the orchestration sound bigger. Strings are always stacked at least once and vocals can be stacked 3 or 4 times. Percussion often requires multiple passes as well to add more instruments to the mix.

Iso or isolation booth: Ideally, from a pure musical perspective, all the musicians would work in the same room. But practically and financially, that is almost impossible. For that reason, some instruments are put into an isolation booth which is a small, soundproof room off the main room. Musicians in those rooms are mic’d, listen through headphones and play along with everyone else.

It depends on the instrument mostly. If a violin hits a wrong note, it can easily be fixed by just recording that one violin. But if a trumpet player is in the main room and hits a wrong note, it is likely that that part of the song would have to be rerecorded by everyone in the main room because a trumpet’s sound is likely to end up in every microphone in the room.

Typically, high brass, percussion and the harp are in iso booths. I will be in an iso booth too because piano is being scratched. To be honest, even if we were not scratching piano, I would still be in an iso booth because I make mistakes in the studio and it would be financially draining to keep recording everyone because my mistakes are in their microphones.

Tracks: Every microphone input is a track on the sound board and there are numerous microphones.  Every instrument will be mic’d at least once and there will be grouping microphones and room microphones as well. I am not sure how many tracks there will be on this project but somewhere between 50-100.

“Greg’s mistakes”: You will hear people throwing out this term often.  Don’t expect me to play perfectly. I am not even close to playing these arrangements perfectly. In fact, I still have not even arranged a lot of it exactly. Much of what I will eventually do is going to depend on how these orchestrations sound to me. The form and harmony will be set in stone but the actual technical things I do will change over the next few months.

I hope you enjoy the day and please ask questions as they come up. I should have time to answer them.  Just remember, if you hear holes in the music at the beginning of the day, they will be filled when we record other instruments. A few holes will not be filled until August though because some percussion and the harp will not be added until then.