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The
Making Of An Album
Page 3
- Recording The First Tracks (MIDI) -
by Michael Tyler
Computer Music Products
Now that we had our system ready and our song selections made, it was time to record the piano parts. Jeremy and I agreed to schedule our recording sessions on Monday late afternoons, as it was the only common time we had open together. We decided to record all the piano parts for each song first. Later, I would add the bass and some basic drum tracks on my own. This would give us the main structure of each song before recording the remaining instrumentation and the vocal tracks.
I connected the digital piano to the system (via the SoundBlaster and a gameport-to-MIDI adapter cable) and setup a new Cakewalk file for each song. Then, I had Jeremy play a few bars so I could get a tempo setting for a metronome click in Cakewalk whenever possible. (Several songs were recorded without the use of a metronome click because it was either too distracting for Jeremy, or because there were too many subtle tempo changes in a particular piece to be practical.)
Jeremy performed the piano parts while I acted as technician when recording these parts (via MIDI) in Cakewalk. We had all the piano parts done in two of our afternoon sessions. I then disconnected the digital piano and connected the small desktop MIDI controller keyboard for the remainder of the project.
Before our next scheduled session, I worked on adding the bass and rhythm tracks. I recorded drum parts in time with Jeremy's piano parts, then recorded all the bass parts after that. I should mention that I was working from simple handwritten lead sheets only, with just the lyrics and chord changes on the sheets. There were no written arrangements for any of the songs, so I relied on my improvisational skills and musical instinct while recording everything "on the fly." This actually wasn't too difficult, as I was already familiar with each song from having performed them live in our congregational services. I already had a good idea of what was needed for each arrangement, and Jeremy provided his own ideas to guide me further.
Once all the songs had the piano, bass, and drum parts recorded, I made a cassette recording of all the songs to give to Jeremy for his review. This assured that we were in agreement with the arrangements up to this point. We re-worked a few things until we were both satisfied. The next step was to record the rest of the main instrumentation.
Next Page (pg.4) Adding Instrumentation ( MIDI )
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