harmonizer wrote:I only watched "Makin' Whoopee" so far. That was really well done.
You talked about the challenge to sync the parts. Were the sax players in general playing more behind the beat? (sax is my main instrument).
Thanks!
Everyone is recording on their own against a sparse backing track. They don’t have the benefit of keying off the lead instrument, so the accuracy is not there.
I start out by creating a backing “shell” in Band-In-A-Box with drums, bass and guitar. I move the tracks into Cubase, add a sparse piano track and a click track. I then remove the drum track from the shell and send it to the drummer to record his part. I also send a shell without the bass line to the bass player so he can record his part. Once the drummer’s part is in, it goes to the rest of the band to record their parts individually. As parts come in, I add them to the project.
What tends to happen is that everyone has their own slight interpretation differences which results in each section having a rather loose sound When you put them together. In the saxes, the two altos are usually pretty on par with the exception of some slight accent/dynamics differences. They both tend to play in front of the beat. The tenor player played slightly behind the beat, which sort of dragged the section a bit so I nudged him up a bit. Bari is a tough instrument. It’s a big horn and it takes time to the air to get through, which then sounds like late notes. I moved him up a lot because I wanted each section to sound punchy and the bari is the key to that punch for the saxes.
There were other cases where someone held a note out too long or not long enough, so I made some corrections there as well. The trombones presented a few challenges as well. Bone 1 has a rather mellow and smooth sound while Bones 2 and 3 were rather punchy and bright. They also had a few rhythmic misgivings.
If you listen to the America The Beautiful recordings, you’ll hear it more clearly. The audio track on the video has very few rhythmic adjustments and not a whole lot of EQ/dynamics blending, while the remixed audio recording on SoundCloud is much clearer. You can hear each section with better definition. I took a lot of time on the remix to line up the rhythmic elements so the hits and counterpoints would stand out.
Overall, this continues to be a great learning experience for me as a hack audio engineer.