Monday the
7th of April. Tonight was the recording session of our Catholic church-choir.
We are making a CD with all the English songs we usually sing at mass, and the
profit we make with the CD will be given to the church. I had prayed that the
session would go well, but I have to say; it was quite a disaster, but that
makes one more funny story to tell!
So, for
once I have been feeling quite well for a longer time, but of course today, on
the day of the recording, I wake up with a sore throat and slight fever. And
when I come to church I see that also Natalja, our strongest voice in the choir
has a thick scarf around her throat and is feeling sick. (She told me it
happens every year; she is never ill during the year, except the week she has a
choir concert! How ironic!)
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| Members of the Catholic Church Choir of Tampere Parish. © Cecilia Damström |
Joao Alferes was doing the recording for us. (For free! So
nice of him!) Unfortunately he hadn’t known that the piano we would use had a
midi-output, so he didn’t have a midi cable with him. So I called the music
technologist Petrus Tuisku and asked if he had any ideas, and he suggested I’d
ask the porter of the conservatory. So I walked back to Tampere conservatory
(luckily the Catholic church and the conservatory are located really close to
each other), found the porter Mikko who was so nice and helped me find a midi
cable that I could borrow.
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| Joao ready for recording the choir. © Cecilia Damström |
By the time
I arrived back in church the headphones weren’t working anymore. And they were
of course headphones which needed a 6.35mm plug in (not the 3.5mm plug in which
for instance computers mp3 players have), so the quickest solution was that I
went home and got my own headphones with the 6.35mm plug in. (Luckily I live
close to church as well!)
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Joao and Zita listening if you can hear the mistake we made or not.
© Cecilia Damström |
Then we
were finally ready to start recording. Except that the piano was doing
something very weird. The midi signal that the piano was giving out was
automatically transposed half a note lower than the sounding range. So when you
played a C, the sound came out as B. So the choir was singing a long with the
sound that came out of the pianos own loudspeakers (in C) but the midi-track on
the computer was the whole time in B. Neither Joao nor I had ever seen
something like this before! Well, luckily Joao found a way of transposing the
midi-track up half a note also in the computer, so after much effort we were
finally all (piano, guitar and singers) in the same key!
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| Happy members of the church choir. © Cecilia Damström |
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| Happy members of the church choir. © Cecilia Damström |
Because I
was the only one singing a second voice (in almost every song) we had to make a
peculiar positioning with me in front of the choir (so that my voice wouldn’t
drown under the other 10 voices). In one song where we didn’t have piano but
instead only guitar and song, we had to position the guitar in front of the
choir.
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| Juan accompanying us on guitar. © Cecilia Damström |
The
recording session was more or less what I expected: long and tiresome but fun.
When you have so many people doing one recording there are always so many
potential things that can go wrong, and most of them happened to us: someone
forgot the words, I started coughing in one song, the pianist made a mistake,
the choir forgot to repeat the chorus… But the most peculiar mistake that
happened a few times was the midi-piano mistake: occasionally the midi-piano
just send out randomly a mess of different notes and made it almost sound like
a short Webern passage in the middle of a song. These random “midi-glissandos”
as we started calling them, happened at any occasion without warning. Sometimes
they were followed up shortly by a new midi-glissando, sometimes we could play
an hour or so without a midi-glissando, and we had no idea what to do about it.
So every time the piano decided to protest with a midi-glissando, we had to
take the whole song from the beginning.
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| Theresa growing tired. © Cecilia Damström |
People were
growing more and more tired, so the amounts of human mistakes were increasing
throughout the evening. We had a break at around 21 and Grace had brought a
lovely cake for all us. (But this lent I’m without sugar, so I didn’t have
any.)
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| Amazing Grace © Cecilia Damström |
Quite at
the end of our recording session we sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Well, it
wasn’t quite Cohen’s version, because we only sang the verses that are suitable
for church, so only three verses. In this song our pianist was feeling so
unsure though so we decided finally I would play the piano. The choir had a
really hard time keeping in tempo, so Joao also had to kind of conduct the
choir while recording. I had a slight hard time with both playing the piano and
at the same time singing (alone) the second voice. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately,
as I don’t know about the end result) the piano was located quite far away from
the singers microphones, so I think my second voice is hardly audible… But we
will see.
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| Natalja and me. |
At around
midnight, after a six hour session, we were finally ready, packed and could leave the Parish hall! Yep
yep, tomorrow I have my piano lesson at 9 AM, so good night!
