Recording The Immigrant, Part 2
As promised, here are some of the gory details of recording
the "original cast demo" of:
(Beautiful logo design by Leah Becker)
The New York City area holds a plethora of truly first-rate
recording studios, where many of the finest cast albums are recorded
(not to mention the pop and classical recordings). Our budget,
however, seriously trimmed the list, as did some additional requirements:
- Our three-piece orchestra was very much used to playing as
an ensemble. So they needed to be able see each other. We did,
though, want to be able to punch-in an overdub if one of the
players went serious astray. This meant that we needed to be
in a space large enough to house the players, allow them to be
in each others line of site, but still preserve a degree of isolation
between instruments -- meaning that we didn't want the sound
of one player bleeding into the microphone of another player.
And since the orchestra would be performing live with the actors,
we needed isolation from them as well.
- Paying for studio time to mix the raw tracks, clean up any
cleanable problems, etc. would eat a huge chunk into our budget,
as well as severely limit the amount of time we'd be able to
afford to devote to the mix. Since our engineer/co-producer,
Randy Hansen, had access to all the equipment we'd need to do
the mixdown (in addition to access to all of the sound effects
he created for the live production), we needed to record in a
way that we'd be able to simply carry the raw tracks from the
recording studio to his facilities. This demanded that we go
with a studio with Pro
Tools digital recording set-up, where we'd bring in our own
hard drive into which the tracks would be recorded. Everything
recorded would be on that drive (as would all the set-ups, routings,
early effects settings, etc.). Plus, it'd have to be a studio
that would charge us an arm and a leg for the use of Pro Tools
(we got quotes ranging everywhere from and extra $100 a day to
and extra $100 an hour!)
- Since Cass Morgan already had a job in town, we'd need a
studio that had space available on one of two Mondays in the
three weeks following our decision to go ahead with this.
- The fact that piano comprised the body of the sound of The
Immigrant's orchestration required a studio with a good sounding
piano (it wouldn't hurt if it was a good playing piano, either)
-- a harder task than you'd imagine. As a matter of fact, one
of the studios that met all of the preceding criteria was knocked
out of the running when we added in the cost of renting a piano
to use instead of their old jalopy.
These requirements trimmed the list down to about three. We
chose what appeared to be the best all around.
A less expensive recording does not necessarily mean a worse
studio (although it can). It will more often mean less,
as in less well-equipped, less well-managed, or less dependable.
Our studio fell into the less dependable category, with some overtones
of less well-equipped. Some of the former problems included channels,
cables, and microphones that had worked for hour suddenly cutting
out and needing to be rerouted or replaced (not to mention having
to search the halls for an engineer to deal with the problem).
The latter included speakers with insufficient frequency response
to carry the low frequency rumble of the piano damper mechanism
(a problem we certainly would have fixed at the recording stage
had we been able to hear it).
Despite these relatively minor problems, this studio was a
pleasant environment to work in, had a nice homey (not to imply
cramped) quality. And we were able to get everything recorded
we had planned to.
Next week: Preparing for the recording.
To read more about the production, see actor, staff, and creative
team bios, etc., here are a few links.
Another Op'ning - The Immigrant,
Pt. 1
Another Op'ning - The Immigrant,
Pt. 2
Another Op'ning - The Immigrant,
Pt. 3
Another Op'ning - The Immigrant,
Pt. 4
Another Op'ning - The Immigrant,
Pt. 5
Recording The Immigrant, Pt.
1
The Immigrant,
A New Musical
CAP21's website
The Knapp-Alper Pages
C U @ the Theatre!
Originally published at Suite101.com
Theatre,
2/13/01