My experiences writing, directing and producing Christian musicals for kids through adults.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Five-hour recording session!

I picked up two of our favorite singers this morning and brought them to our house to record some songs for Louisiana Jane. We need a better rehearsal recording of it, since the sound booth mix we have from the show in 2004 has some crackling on it that we could not get rid of. M and A joined Maggie, Aaron, Randy, and Jeremy and me to sing the ensemble numbers. Jeremy had a rehearsal for a play that he is appearing in next week, so he had to leave, but there's no part for him in "Miss Compton's Finishing School" anyway.

I was hoping for 3, maybe 4 songs, but we managed to record SIX songs! And that was with technical difficulties -- such as Finale getting hung up or quitting a few times -- and Randy needing to transfer the last two songs stave by stave from Finale 2004/2006 into 2010. (He found out he has to transfer it like that if we're going to record vocals; otherwise, no vocal track. Go figure.)

In between takes, the girls and Aaron read through my script for These Are the Voyages (the Star Trek show) on my laptop. That was written back in 2002, when Aaron was the youngest person in the cast at only 9 years old, and it was gratifying to hear the girls frequently erupting in laughter.

By the end, we were all pretty tired and it took us three takes to get the final number right, or good enough. But it's done. Now Randy just has to convert the music files to a different format, equalize, and put in the right order with the other music, and they're ready to go.

6 comments:

  1. There are always bumps in the road. Argh!
    Somewhere along the way of Randy transferring the songs from Finale to Roxio, we lost some of the audio tracks. Fortunately, we made multiple takes, but not always the best ones made it through. Sorry, singer-helpers! But we have what we need, for now.

    In the next couple of months, we're going to record some more songs, for the expanded version of Louisiana Jane, and for These Are the Voyages.

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  2. yay! I'm looking forward to recording!
    Reading through TAtV was a lot of fun, and it was funny hearing Aaron do the voices of Sulu and Scotty!
    Live Long and Prosper!

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  3. I actually like Finale. It can do some amazing things. But I get the feeling the programmers never even considered that someone would be opening files created in F2004 using F2010. Still, I'm a die-hard Finale fan.

    Back to the score...

    Randy

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  4. _\\//

    LOVE These Are the Voyages Mrs. West! And Louisianan Jane!

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  5. Also, I agree with Amy. Aaron doing Sulu and Scotty was awesome. Why was everyone laughing at my Chekov impression? No one will tell me!

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  6. that wasn't Amy, that was me. :-D
    LL&P _\V/

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