03/07/2020
I cut this together for Monroe Community Band over the course of the last month. I learned a few lessons on this:
- cell phones have much better cameras and microphones than laptops.
- laptops on battery, unless otherwise stated, do not maintain a stable clock for recording, so the timecode is unreliable
- amateur musicians, who don't have any studio experience, have a hard time following a guide track
The procedure I followed:
Prep and Recording
- create a guide track. I used a previous recording I had done, and added a click-track count-in for 4 bars at the beginning. Since it was a real band playing, the tempo was not rock-solid, but could be followed easily enough.
- render that to a video and share it.
- conductor of the group recorded himself conducting over the guide track, which was added to the guide and shared to the band members.
- band members did as many takes as they needed to get one that they were satisfied with, and then sent that video back to me (via GDrive mostly, but also via iCloud, and I had one AirDrop session)
Editing
- Load the guide track into Reaper and create a tempo map. It fluctuated from 120bpm to 127bpm. Not bad for a community band (shout out to River Winds Concert Band)
- Start with the tuba and other downbeat instruments (it's a March, gotta know when to put your foot down), and use a combination of detect transients, and manual stretch markers and slice-n-move to get everything placed on the tempo map.
- Percussion came in a little late, so I moved on to low brass and horns. Starting to see some counter-melody and fun stuff now - plus the horns have the "gallop" along with a bunch of other instruments, but that's almost the only thing that we (I play horn too!) play. This helps line up the triplets, since this is a 6/8 march.
- Edit percussion. The bass drum was recorded too low to use, so I had to do drum replacement. I was able to still pick up the transients by using a low pass at 4k and a high-pass at 2k, the boosting it to the moon to pick up the mallet hits. I used an orchestral instrument library (EastWest Symphony Library) and found a good concert bass drum patch with great variation and velocity adjustments. Converted the transients to midi notes using a special gate plugin. Once I got the notes lined up with the temp map, I switched over to a midi controller and used the mod wheel to "play" the dynamics live, while reading the score and playing along with the recording.
- Crash cymbal was a problem only because of the acoustic of the recording space. The transients and formants were fine, but the sustain unusable. I did the same sort of replacement as I did with the bass drum, but used a compressor to clamp the transient of the doubled virtual instrument, but let the sustain through. Mixed in with the real cymbals, it sounded great!
- Worked my way up the sonic triangle, getting other low(er) voices (low reeds, then saxes, then trumpets, clarinets, then oboes and flutes)
- Some channels required very little editing. Some required me to move notes around, find repeats and patch in better versions of the same figures - basic studio post work.
All the editing was done in mono, with occasional stereo checks to make sure there wasn't any strange combing or other phase problems.
Mixing - 100% mixed in 5.1 surround for better imaging
- Pretty intense mix. 38 different instrument channels, 2 additional midi channels.
- Mixed brass as an ensemble to achieve the best possible brass band sound, then mixed woodwinds as an ensemble to achieve the best possible sound.
- Lots of compression applied to certain instruments to tone them down (piccolo, bari sax, Eb Clarinet for example). Any instrument with a really sharp formant had to be massaged. You wouldn't normally have to do this as much - or at all - if recorded in a well-treated studio. Unfortunately, these were recorded in people's living rooms, kitchens, craft rooms - etc., so some accommodations were necessary.
- Some instruments were EQd heavily to reduce "pile-up", especially instruments which extend down into the "mud" range around 150-250Hz. All sub-bass was removed from every channel (except for the bass drum, bari sax, bass clarinet, and tuba). By sub-bass, I mean anything below 80Hz - that which would normally go to a subwoofer.
Since Sousa likes to play the brass off the woodwinds in the Trio of his marches (usually in the repeat), and the interlude (or "dogfight" as it's often called), it was important to get the balance right between these two halves of the band. A very VERY light bit of automation was used to keep the parts in check.
- Tubular Bells! - since this is the "Liberty Bell" in the piece, I took special care to make sure it was well situated in the mix, but poked out when it needed to. The player had a very good touch, so it didn't take much.
Mastering - monitored both in 5.1 and through a DTS-Stereo downmix
- Had a hard time getting the reverb right. Went through every convolution reverb I had, used as an insert on my submaster bus, but it was either muddy, too much or not enough. Ditched the insert approach and used sends to selectively apply reverb to certain instruments. It's a little trick I learned somewhere ;)
- Nothing too special about the mastering, except I did it 100% in the box. I had intended to use my analog board and some outboard gear, but time got away from me, and that workflow requires patience and lots of time. I used Ozone for most of the heavy lifting. A few modeled plugins for some flavor (Pultec EQ, Aphex Exciter, some SSL Master Bus compressor, a little Fairchild 670 - actually used this on some problem instruments to smooth them out: it's ultra-fast attack time can tame oboes, bari sax, anything that can get "noisy" in normal play - and a pass through Ozone).
- Ozone's Maximizer is my go-to mastering limiter. It's just SO good, and can be as transparent or as pumpy as you want. Transparency is key for classical music.
- Waves VU meters and Waves WLM loudness meters are running constantly. I love real VU meters. I have outboard gear I used to run signal through JUST to have a real VU meter :)
- Mastered to -14dBFS to be friendly to all online streaming services.
Video editing was all done in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Enjoy :)
A special presentation by Monroe Community Band, The Liberty Bell by John Philip Sousa! Due to the shutdown and social distancing requirements during the COV...
