Les grâces records our experiences making our first professionally produced CD Click here to see more photos of our recording sessions Today, Les grâces began recording our first professionally produced recording. We had a long day --- especially Rebekah, who arrived at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall at 8:00 in the morning to meet our recording engineer at the hall for setup. The rest of us arrived at 9:30 for hours of tuning, microphone checks, and setup. We took little breaks to listen to the tone quality of the microphone arrangement and input levels, and, after much experimentation (and a lot of patience from our engineer), we finally had a sound that made everyone really happy. By the time we took a break for lunch, we were quite ready for a rest. We started recording at 1:30 in the afternoon. Our CD program is drawn from our 2009 SFEMS program (Les grâces françoises). Recording all this French music means lots of fussy, detail-oriented work, so we were prepped for a long day --- and evening --- of careful work. We are very fortunate to have Grammy winner David Bowles of Swineshead Productions as our producer and engineer. David has certainly proved a careful listener and a constructive critic. He doesn’t let a single beat slide; if there’s a wrong note, an intonation problem, an ensemble problem, he catches it. And that’s good, because while we’re in the thick of it, we need those expert ears! We were proud to have stayed more or less on schedule. By the time we stopped at about 9:45 tonight, we had recorded three movements from a cantata by Montéclair and three movements from a suite by Couperin. We’re a little more than a third through the process, and are ready and rearin’ for more! Boy, making a recording with an ensemble really is hard work. We felt today a bit like soap opera actors. It’s a little known fact that soap operas (and many movies, in fact) are not filmed in order; whenever a set of actors is available, all the scenes in which they play are filmed, regardless of the sequence. Soap opera actors sometimes complain that they don’t understand the plot of the series because of this filming technique. Today was a bit similar for us. We tried to be as efficient and intelligent as possible about our recording order, in order to give Jennifer’s voice time to recover and to allow Annette’s recorder to dry out in-between movements with difficult and high bits. This meant recording a bunch of recitatives at the same time, then switching to an instrumental movement. Then, a single aria. Then Jennifer was off, and we returned to the remaining movements from a piece that we started recording last night. We all felt slightly schizophrenic, but it will surely all come out well in the end. We’re lucky to have David Bowles acting as engineer and producer at the same time. He has a keen ear, and an ability to coax us, gently but firmly, toward more perfect takes. And he does it all with grace. Only once did he hint just how much effort his own part in this process takes, thinking about the editing process for a particularly tricky aria and saying, “Well, I’ve got my work cut out for me.” Hopefully, we’re not going to put him to too much effort with editing! The instruments have taken a bit of abuse from these long days, too. Jonathan has spent lots of time with feathers and a knife, replacing split quills. Today there was a broken string on an important note, right at the beginning of the recording session, and there has been an awful lot of harpsichord tuning. Annette, too, had to do some technician work, taking a blow dryer to her recorder to help dry it out between takes. One day to go – and two and a half complete pieces left to record. Wish us well! View older posts (our European travel blog).