Recording Session w/ Invercargill City Big Band

Date: 22 May 2019

Venue: SIT Sound Auditorium

I made a video to summarise the recording session with the Big band:

Emma Jarman, the conductor of Invercargill City Big Band (ICBB), and I had been communicating for days before we had this session. We discussed via emails and she has been extremely helpful towards my project.

Before this session, ICBB and I had another session two weeks before. However, we decided to do another session as the result was not satisfying. The first reason is because the positioning between the drummer, the keys player, the guitar player and the band was not ideal. Even though this is a Jazz Band but they most play pop songs and requires the drummer to be energetic. Most of the microphones picked up large amount of bleed from the drums. Secondly, I was using close miking rather than multiple stereo miking techniques. It sounded very "individual" and did not sound like a whole band. Thirdly, each musician had their headphones to make sure they could listen to the Keys and the Vocal while they were playing. But it turned out the set up of the headphones was unnecessary and was not efficient for the musicians either.

To prevent all of the problems above from happening in the next session, I had a discussion with my supervisor beforehand. He gave me some constructive advice, such as to use a monitor speaker in the auditorium instead of giving every musician a pair of headphones; use stereo miking techniques, i.e. AB Stereo Pair, Decca tree, and etc. Besides, I revisited the book "Recording Orchestra and Other Classical Ensemble Music", by Richard King. It explains a variety of stereo miking techniques for recording ensemble music, but not much on Jazz ensemble music specifically. I had to do the research online via sources such as YouTube and Sound On Sound. But anyways, I noted down a couple of changes that I wanted to make for the next session.

For the second recording session, I had the Auditorium and Studio 1 booked from 4pm until 11pm, to make sure I would have enough time to set up and to do a proper soundcheck. After an hour and a half of set up, I measured the distances between the microphones and the musicians. I decided to place four Gobos around the drummer, as he plays very intensely. Besides, I also changed the positions of brass and woodwind musicians to face towards the drums, hoping to use the polar pattern (Cardioid) of every mic to reject some of the drum bleed.

After doing soundcheck, I decided to change the polar pattern of the Decca Tree from Omnidirectional to Cardioid, to reduce picking up the drums from behind. I decided to continue close miking some of the instruments: one Flute, one Clarinet, two Trumpets and one Saxophone soloist, as I was afraid they would be drowned out by other loud instruments.

The session went well, the result is much more satisfying than the previous one. We did 7 songs during the session and most of them were done in one take.

One of the hardest parts of recording ICBB was this was my first time interacting with so many musicians at the same time, communication side as well as musically. Luckily I had my classmate, Liam O'Brien, who gave me a big hand during the whole session. There were so many sound sources in the same room and I was trying to get the perfect balance between the direct sound and the room sound, but the drums pretty much energized the whole room.

If I could record the Big Band again, I would place the stereo mics much closer to the brass/woodwind section. I think that would help when it comes to the mixing stage.

Photo with the Big Band

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