Yesterday afternoon I was in the studio with eight other string colleagues to play a backing track for one of the new songs on Pink Martini’s upcoming, highly anticipated third album. Recording is an interesting process. A friend who has done a lot of the really high-class movie work in the LA studios described recording as 90 percent crashing boredom and 10 percent outright terror. The boredom is that you spend quite a long time watching the engineer setting up the mics, running cable and checking levels. You run through the chart a couple of times, then you must do everything you normally do, but perfectly, and often many times in a row. It’s a nice change of pace from the orchestral rehearsal, where you have time to work out any passages that you didn’t fully shed at home during the rehearsals. At concerts, mistakes are at a minimum, but since we hear in a linear fashion, things that do happen recede into memory pretty quickly, and the overall impression of the interpretation is what is left in the mind of the listener.
The recording situation for this session was unique to my experience. Rather than recording to a hard drive, they were using what looked like 3 inch tape stock for the recording, and the machine probably was running at 24 feet per second, so there was a limited amount of material that could be kept for editing. An added wrinkle was that the vocalist, China Forbes, was doing the track live along with us in a vocal booth, with Thomas Lauderdale valiantly donning his conducting hat and trying to keep us with her and her with us. It took a while to get the hang of it, but I think we got a good result. Word is it might be the first track on the new album, but these things have a way of changing as the production gets further along.
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