It's recording day!

Today was the day I did all my recordings! Because of the way the booking system works I had 3 hours to pump out all my recordings, save them on GarageBand projects and then do all the fun snipping/editing myself on my laptop. After today I'm expecting to return to this project after the submission of Honours and the Quart-Ed tour so I recorded as many things as I could think of to say and sing so if I needed something in future I would already have a raw recording of it. One unfortunate thing about that recording sched is I woke up this morning with a cold and all of my spoken instructions sound a bit silly because my nose is blocked. In any case, here is what I learned:

Mic test: My mic knowledge is essentially limited to what gets put in front of my cello every so often and what we learnt in Tech. In the studio I had two mics to choose from, the Rode NT2-A condenser and a Shure SM57 dynamic mic. I'd been recommended the Shure for a "clean podcast sound" but I wasn't sure podcast was the vibe I was going for, since people generally do not sing along with their podcast - they listen and nod seriously as they drive. In the end I just recorded myself talking and singing into both and listened back. I ended up going with the condenser because I felt I was getting a lot of air noises in the Shure. Maybe I was too close? In any case the Rode sounded better, so I went with that for both talking and singing.

Problems I discovered along the way:

• I found that my top notes were WAY LOUDER than the rest of my other sounds, and was particularly obvious and annoying for the songs in a round. To rectify this I tried my recordings again, but moving away from the mic as I approached the high notes. It seemed to work a little bit. I also tried moving myself far away and just projecting: the intonation was not great, and it sounded a bit strained? I kept losing air for the phrases and sounded weird.

• Intonation: I recorded a MIDI instrument drone just for me so I could sound in tune :D

• A "Hmm"-y hum sounded a bit trapped. I tried a“hng” hum with an open mouth instead and that seemed to work better.

• Ghost of John: “with the rest all gooone vs go - o - o - one” Needed to record two lots of Ghost of John because the length of the phrases don’t reflect the breathing pattern (so a whole recording was not useful for the chunking section)