Scoring Session 101 - Part 5: Recording 1

After all preparations for a successful scoring session are done and everything is set, it is time to record.

All other parts of this ongoing series is available here.

The exact procedure of the beginning of a first session of a project varies slightly depending on where you record but the general first steps are always identical. It is quite common to personally talk to the orchestra in the first few minutes introducing yourself and potentially the client who might be present for the recording, explain to them what the project is that you're recording (as they usually will arrive at the studio without knowing what's going to be recorded) and maybe also mention your general conceptual idea with the music. It is not necessary to go too much into detail regarding interpretation just yet as it is more effective to mention these things when you're actually working on the music.

In general, avoid making this introduction too long and extensive, they don't need to know your entire life story and every minute that passes is expensive recording time wasted.

In general, the beginning of the first session will be relatively slow. The first take (of an hopefully loud cue that involves everybody) will be used to set all technical things. This means that the engineer will set all the microphone levels and check whether all signals sound good. It is possible that they will even go back in the recording room and move a few microphones around which will take a few minutes. Also, the musicians will adjust their headphone levels so they can hear the click loud enough. 

All these things will take a while and are no reason to worry. In general, once the dust is settled you will get a long much faster. But it also always takes a while for the musicians to find their role in the ensemble, to get a feeling for the music etc.

The procedure of recording a cue in general is always the same:

1. Runthrough: You let them play through the cue in its entirety once only stopping if it falls apart completely but in general ignoring all things that go wrong as long as the musicians find their way back into it. This is in general needed for everybody to understand the music and to check whether there are some fundamental problems with the cue that need to be addressed. In easier cues you can start commenting on it after the runthrough. On trickier cues, it's best to leave it uncommented as many things you might address will fall into place in the second take. Usually the engineer will record the runthrough but usually you wouldn't want to use that take.

2. Rehearsing passages: This step is optional and only needed on trickier cues. You or the conductor might request to rehearse some difficult bars maybe at a slow tempo, maybe section by section. If you are relatively inexperienced, I would recommend not requesting this as you might be rehearsing something on a problem that everybody has figured out already on their own and rehearsing it would just waste time. It takes experience to get a feeling for what really needs to be rehearsed and what will fix itself in the next take. In general, especially on high energy passages try to rehearse as intelligently as possible. If your brass is playing loud but easy passages in that passage you want to rehearse, leave them out and only rehearse the sections that really need it. It also takes experience to figure out exactly what would be the best rehearsal strategy. Play through at slow tempo? Hold every chord until for everybody to find the right intonation in it? Isolate sections so they can hear their interaction better? If you have a good conductor, they will help you on the decision, especially as they are closer at the musicians and can see and communicate (maybe even nonverbally) what is the problem that needs to be addressed. But as I said above, many things will fall into place without a specific rehearsal. In fact, I have many times been overwhelmed by how big the difference between a run through and the following first take can be.

3. First "real" take: Depending on length and complexity of the cue, you might want to split it into smaller chunks to focus the attention on "digestible" portions. In general, about two minutes is a comfortable length that can be done in one pass but again, depending on complexity, this might be shorter or longer. For you in the booth it is extremely tricky to pay attention and focus on everything. Usually, you don't need to focus on noises as (hopefully) your engineer will focus on that. Your focus should be on interpretation and musical problems like intonation/timing/balancing. It is essential to keep track of which take you're at and what was good or bad at that take to avoid needing to listen through every take in the editing. My personal approach used to be to use differently coloured markers with a specific colour for every take to mark thingsin the score that were good or bad in each take but I recently have transitioned to using CueDB for that. You continue doing takes until you have a useful recording of every passage (that if needed can be edited together). Knowing what is possible in editing and what not will of course be really helpful in the decision of whether to move on or do another take. In general, with cues that are recorded to click, it is quite easy to "punch in". This means if you are happy with a take but there was one spot that was not too great, you can request to just do a take of that one bar (of course with some preroll and postroll material to be able to edit). The ideal of course always is to get as much material out of one take as possible as this will also give you a more musical interpretation.

4. Safety Take: If time permits, always do one more take after the one that you're happy with. It is quite common to not hear every small problem and stumble across it in editing/mixing. In these cases it is great to have another alternative.

In general, try to get a good take of a cue before moving on. You might be tempted to revisit a cue at the end of a session if time permits, but in 95% of the cases it will not get better than the first attempt as it is for the musicians like starting from zero again. So you cannot expect them to continue recording at the level that you left off a few hours earlier.

In the next part, we will dive deeper into how how to communicate your comments to the musicians and how to decide when a cue is done.