As I was entering the polishing stages of my pieces (see blog post 1), I reached out to the recording technician, mixing and mastering technician, and graphic designer that I used to create my first album to see if they would be available to work on my second. I received quick and eager replies from everyone which made me very happy as I’d have the same team. There is something comforting about working with great people a second time as we all understood each other's work flow and what we need from one another.
Recording I initially found my recording technician, John Rosefield, through a colleague of mine, John Kofi Dapaah. It was after asking John D who recorded his first piano album - I liked the sound, balance, and tone quality of it - that John D put me in touch with John R. It was exciting to work with John R to put together my first piano album.
Upon securing John R again for my second recording, I booked two five-hour blocks of time at the recital studio at Ottawa Pianos as it has a Yamaha CFX piano (nine-foot-long grand piano) available to use. The initial block of time was scheduled in May 2022 to record the first four piece (June, Rivers, Raindrop Prelude, and La cathédrale engloutie), and the second block was scheduled for September 2022 to record the remaining four pieces (Jeux d’eau, Au bord d’une source, Reflections, and Rain Tree).
I chose to divide my recording sessions into two for a few reasons:
I didn’t want to record eight pieces in one session as it was too much.
I wanted to only focus on four pieces at once (rather than eight) so that I could ensure to have a better quality outcome in my recording sessions
I needed more time to perfect Reflections by Ho, and I also wanted the composer’s feedback
For each piece I did the following: two full takes of the whole piece and one or more run-throughs of each section of the piece (each piece had between three to six sections which I decided upon prior to recording). This approach facilitated having at least three takes of every section of each piece so that I had plenty to choose from when doing edits. Editing The first step in my editing process was to listen to everything that I recorded without taking notes to get an overall idea of what everything sounded like. After this, I listened to each section from each take (whether that’s a full take or a section run-through) and wrote down what worked well and what didn’t work well in each respective section. The factors in choosing what worked or not were not only based on note accuracy and tempo, but also on dynamics, tone colour, blend of sounds, balance, pedal depth, and frequency of pedal changes.
I created a spreadsheet to keep track of all my edits: all my full takes were listed as ‘Take #’ and any section run-throughs were listed as ‘Section # Take #’ with the respective take and section number filled in. The example below showcases what the spreadsheet looked like for Section 1 of Raindrops:
Once I finished writing down what worked well or not, I looked at the spreadsheets of each section to see which full take recording I was the most satisfied with overall. I then used the chosen full take as a base for all my other small edits. The section run-throughs were used to insert small segments of music into the full take in the event that it was better quality. For example, in June I used the second full take as my base and made a chart for John which specifically corresponds to the measure numbers, the take substitutions, the time stamps, and any helpful comments.
After each of my spreadsheets were completed, I sent them to John and asked him to put together each piece as best he could as he didn’t have any prior knowledge of these pieces. When finished, he sent the tracks to me to evaluate how close he was to what I envisioned. I listened to them and wrote out my thoughts in a spreadsheet similar to the one above.
The final stage in the editing process was to assess the final tweaks. For this we met in person and discussed any cuts that one of us missed, the minute hesitations, or anything else that I wanted to remove. Despite it being a short list of tweaks, it still took us about five hours together to satisfy the level at which I wanted the pieces to be finalized.
Mixing and Mastering
After the editing was completed, the last step was to prepare the audio tracks for mixing and mastering. This was completed by Rob Cosh, a colleague and business partner of John R. Mixing is where the sound files recorded from the microphones are adjusted in a way that balances the equalization (EQ) and compression and panning and reverb to make a harmonious sound throughout a piece. Mastering involves putting the finishing touches on a track to get the overall loudness and frequency curve adjusted for the various media formats, devices, and speaker systems so that the album sounds good as a unified whole.
Rob did a lot of work on this independently and when he was finished, we met for just over an hour to do some final tweaks. He explained to me the ‘velocity curve’ that he created for each piece and how manipulating this curve would have an influence on the various piano sounds that were heard: bass, mid-range, highs, room resonance, key action, and pedal noise.
He created two mastered versions and sent them to me for a final evaluation. After listening to them I decided on version two which he described as having a “slight increase in the richness of tonality, more transformer warmth and weight, as well as a slightly wider soundstage which adds focus to the perception of space.” Of course it’s hard to describe the differences in the sound, but after listening to the tracks I could grasp what he was referring to. Once the final decision was made, he sent me the two different file types that I needed: ones that are for physical CDs and ones that are for online streaming.
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