OP
OP
RECORDING IS FINISHED, SO LET'S START EDITING!
If only that's how it worked, where we could start editing samples and making Kontakt instruments right away. Truth be told, we actually did do that with a couple basic articulations, because it’s hard to resist. The problem, though, is that any editing done before the tracks are mixed is wasted. None of our samples will be keepers until we have final stereo mixes
So … just do the mixes, right? Well, you know how when you mix a cue for a client, it's really hard to stop, and put the word "Final" on it? This is like that, but amplify it by a hundred, because this isn't a 60 second cue that gets played once and then it’s over. This is 17.5 hours of recording for the Men (five 4-hour sessions, minus 10 minute hourly breaks.) and 21 hours for the women (six days minus breaks.) Each sample will be played by users again, again, again … and again. You want to be sure you’re happy with the balance.
Granted, our choir mix isn't as complicated as a 120-track epic adventure cue, since we're dealing with a fairly straightforward setup of three room mics at the front, two ambient mics in back, a stereo overhead pair in front of the singers, and eight close mics. With Sunset Strings, it was simple, as the three mic positions were Close, Room, and Ambient (the rear mics) and the mixes were literally the designated mics, with no blending of close mics with the room mics, or anything like that. So the “Room Mix” was simply the front three mics. Easy.
For the choir, though, we decided a little more finesse was called for, since you want more detail with a choir. Consonants get lost quickly with mics being further away. So the Room mics (Telefunken 251s) all by themselves wouldn't be as optimal for a "Main" mix, as they were with Sunset Strings. So for our Choir "Full Mix," we (actually Jayden, since he has better ears for this than I do) went with a combination of the front room mics combined with the stereo overheads and the close mics. That’s the main mix I assume everyone will use. The other two mixes are the Close mics and an Ambient mix of the five Telefunkens.
The de-noise process is also trickier than with the Strings, because a choir is much, much quieter than an instrumental ensemble. When you have mics 50 feet away from a singer doing whisper articulations, you can imagine the challenges. (Especially with Green Day being in Studio B that week. If they didn’t close their doors, we’d get some low end rumble.)
Those mixes took Jayden a few weeks. Men in one Pro Tools session, Women in another, and then five PT sessions for the smaller breakout ensembles (for Repetitions and stuff.) Then my job was to rearrange all the regions in each of these PT sessions so they would be in a more logical order. They weren’t already in a logical order, because during the recording process, I didn't want to make it too boring by recording sustain after sustain after sustain, then moving to legato after legato after legato. Each day was a mix of all sorts of articulations. So I needed to compile all the attacks (for instance) from Days 2, 3, 4, and 6 into one grouping.)
Here’s a fun fact I learned as I did this: Pro Tools has a 24 hour limit on session size. I never knew that before, since no one’s ever asked me to record a 24 song. (With Mike Greene songs, people tend to request less, not more.) When you have a Women's session of 21 hours, and you need extra space at the end to move regions into so you can juggle the other regions, it gets tricky.
Anyway, that all got finished just a few days day ago. Yep, that’s how slow this process is. Vincent has done some actual sample editing, and we have some basics, but not a lot.
ONE MIX OR THREE?
I'm really tempted to have just one mic mix, and the “Full Mix” sounds great to me. In fact, with Sunset Strings, I personally never use the Ambient or Close mixes, so I don’t really see the point in alternates. More importantly, regarding the task at hand, three mixes makes the editing process much more difficult. 17 hours of men recordings, 21 hours of women, and 3 hours each for five other smaller breakout groups … that’s a lot of stuff!
Don’t worry, I know I’m probably in the minority on this. (I am but a simple rock and roll guy.) And Jayden and Vincent strongly disagree with me on this … and I can’t do this without Jayden and Vincent, so we're going with three mixes.
But still, this would be a lot easier if it were just a single stereo mix. Just sayin’.
BLACK FRIDAY IS NOT OUR FRIEND
You may want to skip this section, because I’m about to start whining. Really, it's best for all involved if you move past this part. Okay, so has everybody skipped to the next section? Good, because don’t say I didn’t warn you!
The number of hours I’ve put into this project since we finished recording is pitifully low. The problem is that all sorts of other things compete for my time:
Making Black Friday ads for Realitone, as well as coordinating Black Friday ads for this forum, probably took around 80, maybe even a hundred hours. That’s probably tough to believe, but it’s true, because there are so many “little things” involved that keep sucking up time during the Black Friday period. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a profitable time, and when you’re already a hundred grand in the hole for choir recording sessions, you need “a profitable time.” But damn, it’s frustrating.
Then my wife scheduled a couple trips, and I try not do work while we’re vacationing. (Divorces are even more expensive than choir recording sessions.) So there’s two more weeks gone. Plus family stuff in general, where I’m expected to be “a good dad” or “a good son” or “a good husband” … it’s exhausting! Don’t these people realize I’ve got samples to edit and KSP code to write???
Plus, I may have mentioned that we’re doing a full remodel here at the studio (it’s 3,000 square feet), which is time consuming in ways I hadn’t expected. (Okay, seriously, skip to the next section now, because here’s where “White guy complaining about hard his life is” really kicks into high gear.) For starters, installing new flooring means everything has to be moved. I’ve been here 30 years, so moving “everything” includes a pool table, pinball, a B3, a C3, a couple Rhodes and about 20 other keyboards, and then the guitar amps … heck, I even kept one of our original 24-track decks, just because I thought it looked cool. There’s just way too much stuff here, and much of it, like the 13’ x 8’ L-shaped desk I’m sitting at right now, cool as it is (it replaced the Trident 80B console) was built in place, with a welded steel framework. Welded! I don’t know how the f- I’m going to move this thing. Plus all the wiring under the floors with popouts at various places for access to consoles and stuff …what have I gotten myself into?
I know, I know. First world problems. But still, picking paint samples and packing for trips is killing my choir-library making rhythm! And it’s hard to keep Vincent and Jayden motivated when at our Zoom meetings each week, I say, “Uhhh, I did nothin’ this week.”
Continued ...
If only that's how it worked, where we could start editing samples and making Kontakt instruments right away. Truth be told, we actually did do that with a couple basic articulations, because it’s hard to resist. The problem, though, is that any editing done before the tracks are mixed is wasted. None of our samples will be keepers until we have final stereo mixes
So … just do the mixes, right? Well, you know how when you mix a cue for a client, it's really hard to stop, and put the word "Final" on it? This is like that, but amplify it by a hundred, because this isn't a 60 second cue that gets played once and then it’s over. This is 17.5 hours of recording for the Men (five 4-hour sessions, minus 10 minute hourly breaks.) and 21 hours for the women (six days minus breaks.) Each sample will be played by users again, again, again … and again. You want to be sure you’re happy with the balance.
Granted, our choir mix isn't as complicated as a 120-track epic adventure cue, since we're dealing with a fairly straightforward setup of three room mics at the front, two ambient mics in back, a stereo overhead pair in front of the singers, and eight close mics. With Sunset Strings, it was simple, as the three mic positions were Close, Room, and Ambient (the rear mics) and the mixes were literally the designated mics, with no blending of close mics with the room mics, or anything like that. So the “Room Mix” was simply the front three mics. Easy.
For the choir, though, we decided a little more finesse was called for, since you want more detail with a choir. Consonants get lost quickly with mics being further away. So the Room mics (Telefunken 251s) all by themselves wouldn't be as optimal for a "Main" mix, as they were with Sunset Strings. So for our Choir "Full Mix," we (actually Jayden, since he has better ears for this than I do) went with a combination of the front room mics combined with the stereo overheads and the close mics. That’s the main mix I assume everyone will use. The other two mixes are the Close mics and an Ambient mix of the five Telefunkens.
The de-noise process is also trickier than with the Strings, because a choir is much, much quieter than an instrumental ensemble. When you have mics 50 feet away from a singer doing whisper articulations, you can imagine the challenges. (Especially with Green Day being in Studio B that week. If they didn’t close their doors, we’d get some low end rumble.)
Those mixes took Jayden a few weeks. Men in one Pro Tools session, Women in another, and then five PT sessions for the smaller breakout ensembles (for Repetitions and stuff.) Then my job was to rearrange all the regions in each of these PT sessions so they would be in a more logical order. They weren’t already in a logical order, because during the recording process, I didn't want to make it too boring by recording sustain after sustain after sustain, then moving to legato after legato after legato. Each day was a mix of all sorts of articulations. So I needed to compile all the attacks (for instance) from Days 2, 3, 4, and 6 into one grouping.)
Here’s a fun fact I learned as I did this: Pro Tools has a 24 hour limit on session size. I never knew that before, since no one’s ever asked me to record a 24 song. (With Mike Greene songs, people tend to request less, not more.) When you have a Women's session of 21 hours, and you need extra space at the end to move regions into so you can juggle the other regions, it gets tricky.
Anyway, that all got finished just a few days day ago. Yep, that’s how slow this process is. Vincent has done some actual sample editing, and we have some basics, but not a lot.
ONE MIX OR THREE?
I'm really tempted to have just one mic mix, and the “Full Mix” sounds great to me. In fact, with Sunset Strings, I personally never use the Ambient or Close mixes, so I don’t really see the point in alternates. More importantly, regarding the task at hand, three mixes makes the editing process much more difficult. 17 hours of men recordings, 21 hours of women, and 3 hours each for five other smaller breakout groups … that’s a lot of stuff!
Don’t worry, I know I’m probably in the minority on this. (I am but a simple rock and roll guy.) And Jayden and Vincent strongly disagree with me on this … and I can’t do this without Jayden and Vincent, so we're going with three mixes.
But still, this would be a lot easier if it were just a single stereo mix. Just sayin’.
BLACK FRIDAY IS NOT OUR FRIEND
You may want to skip this section, because I’m about to start whining. Really, it's best for all involved if you move past this part. Okay, so has everybody skipped to the next section? Good, because don’t say I didn’t warn you!
The number of hours I’ve put into this project since we finished recording is pitifully low. The problem is that all sorts of other things compete for my time:
Making Black Friday ads for Realitone, as well as coordinating Black Friday ads for this forum, probably took around 80, maybe even a hundred hours. That’s probably tough to believe, but it’s true, because there are so many “little things” involved that keep sucking up time during the Black Friday period. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a profitable time, and when you’re already a hundred grand in the hole for choir recording sessions, you need “a profitable time.” But damn, it’s frustrating.
Then my wife scheduled a couple trips, and I try not do work while we’re vacationing. (Divorces are even more expensive than choir recording sessions.) So there’s two more weeks gone. Plus family stuff in general, where I’m expected to be “a good dad” or “a good son” or “a good husband” … it’s exhausting! Don’t these people realize I’ve got samples to edit and KSP code to write???
Plus, I may have mentioned that we’re doing a full remodel here at the studio (it’s 3,000 square feet), which is time consuming in ways I hadn’t expected. (Okay, seriously, skip to the next section now, because here’s where “White guy complaining about hard his life is” really kicks into high gear.) For starters, installing new flooring means everything has to be moved. I’ve been here 30 years, so moving “everything” includes a pool table, pinball, a B3, a C3, a couple Rhodes and about 20 other keyboards, and then the guitar amps … heck, I even kept one of our original 24-track decks, just because I thought it looked cool. There’s just way too much stuff here, and much of it, like the 13’ x 8’ L-shaped desk I’m sitting at right now, cool as it is (it replaced the Trident 80B console) was built in place, with a welded steel framework. Welded! I don’t know how the f- I’m going to move this thing. Plus all the wiring under the floors with popouts at various places for access to consoles and stuff …what have I gotten myself into?
I know, I know. First world problems. But still, picking paint samples and packing for trips is killing my choir-library making rhythm! And it’s hard to keep Vincent and Jayden motivated when at our Zoom meetings each week, I say, “Uhhh, I did nothin’ this week.”
Continued ...
