Recording Session w/ Vibratsiya

Date: 27 June 2019

Venue: St John Church

Vibratsiya is a Piano Trio that consists of three high-school students from Verdon College and James Hargest College. There are Lewis Thompson (violin), Alexander Lindsay (violin), and Renee Brookland (piano). They prepared Five Pieces for 2 Violins and Piano by Dmitri Shostakovich for the New Zealand Chamber Music Contest in June. I got the chance to know the group when I attended James Hargest College's Orchestra practice back in March, in search of suitable musicians for my project.

We had two recording sessions before we got the final result. The reason I chose to record in St. John church was because it's a place that has a decent grand piano and acoustics for recording, and also because I could easily gain access.

On 29 May, we had our first recording session. However, we didn't do much during that session as there was some miscommunication that happened between me and the musicians. The musicians thought recording was a quick process, and I only had 20 minutes to do the sound check as well as the actual recording, as one of them had to go to work in promptly. I was frustrated but I also learned that I should've explained to the group beforehand, and shouldn't have assumed everyone would know how the recording process goes. Even though I was frustrated at the situation, as they informed me in a very short time and I organized everything in a day and turned out the result was a disaster, I reorganized my mind and explained to them the situation, and organized another session with them.

On 27 June, we had another session at St. John church. I spent two hours on setting up the session. I placed an XY Coincident with two RØDE NT55s on top of the violins and AB Spaced Pair with two sE4400s for the piano. In between the piano and the violins, I chose to use Blumlein (two Neumann U87s) and ORTF (two Neumann KM184s) to capture the whole stereo image.

Recording session with Vibratsiya

We had sufficient time to do a couple of takes this time, to make sure I would have more options while editing. Luckily there weren't many big trucks passing by while we were recording, but we still encountered some big traffic noise during the recording, which was not really avoidable. I tried my best to reduce the sound of the traffic during mixing. Another problem during the recording session was: the church had no heater and they felt cold, some friction noise from the clothes can be heard in the track. Unfortunately the school doesn't provide very decent noise reduction plug-ins like RX6. But I still tried my best to EQ or fade out the unwanted sound. This will be elaborated on in another blog.