Previous posts in this series:

What do young artists and ensembles need to know about recording?

What musicians should know about recording, part 1: Where to record

The Recording Process, Part 2: The Recording Team

The Recording Process, Part 3: Getting the Sound

Once everyone has agreed on the sound (the subject of my previous post), the process of recording the music can begin in earnest. We typically record a piece one movement at a time, starting with a full play-through of the first movement to be recorded. Note: this does not necessarily mean the first movement of the piece. Musicians usually arrange movements and pieces in whatever order is most conducive to recording ("live"recordings are an obvious exception). For string players, this may mean doing the fastest, most energetic parts first, before their bow arms become fatigued,and saving slower movements for the end. For wind players, this means just the opposite, since it is the slowest movements with their long sustained notes that require the most lung power. For singers, this often means doing the lowest passages first, since they may not still have those low notes in their voices by the end of the session.

After the first play-through, I usually invite the musicians to come back and listen to a playback on the speakers with me. This allows them to hear how their performance is coming across and compare notes in the discussion that follows. This also gives them a chance to let their producer know about any spots he or she should listen for especially -- e.g.,where the balance may be tricky or where they may be trying for something special (a harmonic, an ornament, etc.) that might not come off in every take.(Recording sessions provide an opportunity to go for an ideal performance that may not be achievable in live performance where such risks cannot always betaken.)

After that play-through, the musicians may continue with full runs of the piece or movement or may want to break it up into more manageable sections, depending on its length and/or difficulty. The players then run through the piece/movement or each section a few times. In most cases, there are moments or smaller sections that require extra attention for musical (e.g., a hard to coordinate attack) or non-musical (e.g., a loud page turn) reasons. These are then gone over as many times as needed to get them right.

In order for these different takes to fit together in editing later, it is very important that tempos remain consistent whenever the same passage is being played. If the musicians change their mind about a tempo (which often happens), the section has to be recorded from scratch, since the earlier takes will not match the ones in the ultimately agreed-upon tempo.

Sometimes special tricks are required to do things that would be impossible in performance but expected on recordings. For example, when string players have to take mutes off their instruments, it invariably makes noise -- noise that is particularly well picked up by microphones. So we always have to come back to those spots and re-record them two ways: first with players keeping their mutes on past where they would normally come off and then starting with the mutes already off from before the mutes-off spot. Later, we splice those two takes together at the right spot so the instruments have the mutes on and off where they should, with no noise in between.

Another example of doing the impossible came when we recorded a 20^th century piece for a chamber ensemble including flute. There was a passage with so many rapid notes in the flute that the player confessed she always had to leave one out in performance because she would need six fingers on one hand to get them all. We gave her that "sixth finger" by having her leave out different notes on different takes and splicing them together so that all the notes were there (as you would expect on arecording).

Depending on the nature of the piece or movement, it is often helpful to do a full run-through at the end, after it has been recorded in sections and all the problem spots have been worked out (and the players have nothing to worry about). I find we often get our best material from this "Take A" -- as Grammy-winning, frequent Cedille producer Judith Sherman likes to call it.

What I describe above is the ideal, and the way solo and small chamber music sessions usually go, in my experience. When dealing with a larger ensemble such as an orchestra, one is usually "on the clock," i.e.,needing to get through everything in a set amount of time, in which case there will not be time for listening to a lot of playbacks, for example, because all the playing must be compressed into the available time. Typically, each hour of recording yields about 5 minutes of finished music (and most union recording contracts require the musicians to be paid for an hour of work for every 10 minutes of music on the disc -- even for "live" recordings).

After all of the music for a disc is recorded this way and everything is "in the can" (a term borrowed from the film industry) the "post-production" process begins with the editing of the session takes into a coherent whole. That process, from editing to finished master, will be the subject of my next and last post in this series.