This week, 10 college students were here crashing on couches, floors, and inflatable mattresses as they spent their spring break with us recording a new album.
Long-time readers of this blog may be aware that Ann and I met in 1996 at USC, where we were founding members of the SoCal VoCals. The VoCals were my first stint in an a cappella group, but Ann had previously sung in the Victory Eights (the “V8s”) during her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA.
The V8s have a long and proud history, going all the way back to the group’s founding in 1942. Ann has stayed involved with the group as a proud alumna since she graduated in 1991, so it was little surprise she was in attendance when the group celebrated its 80th anniversary last October. The group hasn’t recorded an album since 2011, so Ann pitched an idea to the current group: would they consider coming to Arlington for their Spring Break to record with us?
The group’s leadership were very enthusiastic about that idea, and over the next 6 months Ann was in near constant contact with the current V8s, talking about the process of recording and production with us here at ULS, the logistics of getting that many singers into the studio, and in what order, and how much we could reasonably expect to accomplish in a week.
The days and weeks went by, and finally the group arrived at the studio last Sunday night. Starting Monday morning, the marathon was on. We recorded 11 songs — nine multitrack versions of songs from the group’s current repertoire, with up to four singers in the four corners of ISO 2 recording at one time. This wound up being a good balance of isolation vs. energy – each singer was reasonably isolated from the others, but they could see each other and play off each other’s expressions, body language and attitude.
We also got two simpler versions of the group’s traditional greeting and farewell songs recorded with a simple stereo microphone.
With the exception of the two single stereo mic recordings, each singer was recorded individually on a pair of microphones — a Royer ribbon and Mojave condenser. The two microphones offer slightly different sound characteristics, and the plan is to choose one version or the other depending on what a particular song calls for.
Recording each singer on their own set of mics is tremendously powerful when it comes to cleaning up timing and tuning, but it can be a real challenge to preserve the “fiction” that everyone was singing together at the same time, on stage, in front of an enthusiastic crowd. One of the ways we tried to preserve that energy was to have the group record a “scratch video” of each song. Each day at 8:30, the group would gather around the piano, with Ann plunking out notes to help keep things in tune, and they would record a version of whatever songs we’d be doing in the studio that day. We encouraged them, as much as possible, to have the same kind of energy on the scratch recording as they hoped to have on the final product. They might use a click track to keep themselves in time if the song called for it, but otherwise, one of the group’s directors would conduct the pushes and pulls of tempo, just as they do in a live performance. In that respect, we got a very nice, organic feel to the group’s timing when the track called for it.
Then, groups of singers, typically separated by voice part, would take up positions in the four corners of ISO 2 to lay down their parts. We have video monitors around the perimeter of the room, so the singers could see and hear the music direction from the scratch video recorded that morning.
All in all, it was a very fun week, and we got a lot of good raw material for the project. Stay tuned for updates on the ULS Instagram feed!
