How to Record a Virtual Big Band - Tutorial for Social Distance Music Projects

[Music] [Music] hey so my name is elliot deutsch as you as you know if you've been following my channel i don't do these kind of videos very often but i've been asked over and over again recently how i'm able to get the band to sound so realistic in our virtual performances this is kind of a new medium i'm by no means a world expert at this but i think i have seen some really good success and i've been following a lot of other virtual big bands i love it if i'm gonna do it i love watching other ones but they don't all have the same level of success as far as creating a performance that feels like it could have been recorded together in the room so i've been asked over and over again how i'm able to do this i'm sure this isn't the only way to get there but this is the way that i do it and hopefully i mean we're all in this pandemic together [Music] which is keeping us from being able to perform together as a trumpeter i don't know when the next time i'm going to be able to sit in front of a on the bandstand with my fellow musicians and make music together so this is the best we have right now i just kind of want to share my methods to getting the most realistic performance possible i'm imagining that a lot of band directors are going to be trying to do this with their school bands this is the first time and i wish you luck i mean this is very possible to do my methods are geared you know i i have a professional band and i am a composer so those definitely play into my methods a little bit but i think most of what i do can be applied at any level if you have any success with this i really want to hear from anyone if you have any questions put them in the in the comments section and i'll get back to you really quickly i've done four of these videos so far we have a fifth one in the works and we're just going to keep doing it as long as the pandemic continues so that said let's get into how it actually works [Music] this video is focusing on how to record the band to get the best possible performance together there are lots of tutorials on how to make split screen videos that are great i'll put a couple of links in the description of my favorites i'm no means an expert videographer i've been learning as i go i think i've had pretty good success but there are better people at that than me okay so before we even get in to people recording their parts let's talk about notation [Music] we've you've got to imagine we're gonna have a bunch of of uh people or students recording separately in their own situations if you're a group that plays together a lot already this might not be as big of a deal because you already can anticipate how the other musicians are going to play specific passages i'm talking about interpretation a lot of music especially jazz band music which is my specialty leads a lot to interpretation so when you're going to do a remote performance you've got to really get as much of this into the music as possible so if it's a piece that you wrote i suggest going through i mean you know page by page on sibelius or finale or whatever you use and make sure that everything that should have an articulation does so if it's a swing feel piece make sure that all of the quarter notes are articulated so either a staccato or a mercado or a tenuto marking or it's under a slur you know articulation then make sure that everything that the form is well indicated so a lot of jazz band pieces have open solo sections so make sure that that's indicated exactly what you want so if you want two soloists each of them taking two times background second time uh say it write it on all the parts instead of saying open backgrounds on cue say four times backgrounds uh second time and fourth time if you're doing a tenor solo first right solo first and then on the you know trombone solo or whatever's next go solo third and fourth times so just make sure that everything's super super clear the other thing that's important to iron out or fermatas so if you have a fermata which is pretty common especially on ending notes you would normally hold the last note and then cut the band off but you're not gonna be able to do that for obvious reasons so the the best thing to do usually is to just decide exactly how many beats it's going to be and if you're lucky enough to be playing a piece that doesn't uh at the end you can literally count out like if you if you count it to seven beats have a whole note tied to a dotted half note with a marking off on four so i would make that as unambiguous as possible if you've got a caesura just decide exactly how many beats it is maybe make it a five four bar with a quarter rest for the entire band this might make it look a little bit more difficult to read but it's gonna make it a lot easier to record when people aren't in the same room together all right now we're gonna get into the nitty-gritty the way that i actually record it you have to think about what it's like to actually play in a jazz ensemble there is a hierarchy for interpretation so as a trumpeter i usually played a section part sometimes i played lead but usually i was playing in the section when i was in college or in various bands i'm usually in the section so i know as a section player to listen up to my lead player if they're playing this you know hit a little bit longer than you'd expect you'd go with them or the lengths of falls just you know everything exactly how loud or how soft they follow their lead players for interpretation so by extension you basically want the lead players to record before the section players so now let's go backwards from that first trombone and the first alto both listen up to the lead trumpet that's sort of the lead instrument for the band so unless you've got an interesting you know arrangement that has somebody else playing lead for the band you probably want the lead trumpet to record before the lead alto and the lead trombone then let's take that a step further the lead trumpet gets their interpretation from the rhythm section so what i do when i record the band is i have the drummer record first then the bass player then the rest of the rhythm section and lead trumpet then once i have all that done then we add on the other lead players then we add the section players below and then the last thing is the soloists with that in mind let's talk about how we actually do it so let's imagine for a second that you're that drummer recording first what do you actually record to [Music] if you just give them a tempo and expect them to somehow make all the hits i don't know a pro drummer that's going to sound particularly natural doing that so what i've been doing is before i even send anything out to be recorded i'm go i'm in sibelius making uh all the adjustments to the articulation and getting rid of fermatas and cesuras and all that kind of stuff then i'm literally notating an entire bass part like a way that you would never do for a high school abandoned app um i'm writing every single note as if the bass player is going to read it honestly because then sibelius will be able to play it back which we're going to get to [Music] i also usually put in some very basic piano comping notated out fully during solo sections in sibelius there's a function to export a midi file and i'm sure it's in finale and dorico make sure you export it as uh midi type one if it does that it'll have all the information when you bring it into logic or pro tools or whatever you use to make your midi file i think garageband will even do this too it's gonna have all the tracks separated uh you're gonna have to clean it up a little bit as you can see the midi file opens in the logic pretty well uh the saxophones trumpets trombones are all in score order and uh you have the appropriate icons bass trombone is a grand piano which we can fix easily uh the bass is playing an octave up which is also easy to remedy we're gonna be deleting the drums anyway so don't worry about there not being anything there at this point i'll construct a click track depending on the tempo of the piece i'll do two measures or four measures of click in front if it's fast i'll do four and if it's you know medium or slower i'll usually do two measures of click in front i make a virtual drum track and then either quarter notes or half notes depending again on how fast the tempo is i'll just use a cowbell sound you want it to be something loud that that the band anyone that's recording along with the midi is going to be able to hear through the midi so it's got to be loud and a lot of times i'll put compression on that midi track and just crank it a little bit so that the the drummer will be able to hear it in their headphones regardless of how bad everything else gets it's not particularly pleasant to listen to but it gets the job done then i export it as an mp3 and send it to the drummer along with a pdf of their part then the drummer records along to that track and the reason that we put the click in the track like that is just we don't know what setup each of the musicians is going to have if i was sending this to a professional recording studio i might not put a click at all because their software is going to sync up with it properly and they can control what kind of click they want and how loud they want it to be and make those decisions themselves but in in this sort of pandemic situation you have a lot of people a lot of great musicians that are not also recording engineers i mean that's a serious specialty so they might not have invested in a program like logic or dp or pro tools and they might not have the capability of uh of setting up their own click so it's a lot easier just to know that it's going to be right i've put it in the track and if they want to do their own click over that click that's okay and if they request a version of it without a click i'm happy to send it to them as well so i create this midi it's all the horns and bass and piano and no drums but a very loud click and i send it to the drummer and they record along to it and they take a video of themselves while they're recording for video reasons and and they send me back their track then i take that drum track plop it into logic get the level so that it sounds more or less in balance with the midi horns and then i mute the midi bass print out a new mp3 of it send it off to the bass player and they do the same thing then i add in the bass part and hopefully you can hear this developing i put the bass part in then i uh usually print out a version of that for the guitarist and the lead trumpet [Applause] [Music] i make another version of it without the midi piano to send to the pianist and then at that point when i get back a lead trumpet part then i send it to first trombone and first alto then as i'm getting parts back i add them in once i've gotten a lead player in each section generally i mute all of the midi [Music] the point of the midi was to give people a reference as to when figures happen or they don't it removes a lot of ambiguity uh but at that point there is no ambiguity so you don't need it anymore and honestly it's pretty unpleasant to record along to this midi uh it's a it's a necessary evil of getting a good recording like this so at this point once you've gotten all the tracks back i usually go in and i clean it up a little bit and you can do edits yourself in in uh in a program like logic or even garage band like where i'll just go and mute certain if if there's a mistake usually if there's 17 or 18 horns and you mute one of them it's not a big deal um if there are any like major mistakes or things that are that that just don't line up or people miss wrong notes send it back to them and have them record it again if they're uh savvy enough they can just do punch-ins on their own part but if not it just doesn't take that long to record through a four minute big band chart okay at that point once i've got everything there i print out a version with all the the instruments and i send it off to the soloist i think the probably the easiest way to do it is to layer on the solos at the end what's important by the way when you when you're sending when you're getting a solo back is make sure that they export the stem with a lot of blank space so that lines up at the beginning of the track it's or they can send the uh the stem and also print a demo basically with with with the whole band plus their solo just so you get the the the their solo lined up just right i had a horror story with one with a solo a solo that i had recorded and i lined it up incorrectly um and we had to actually take the video down from youtube recut the video to the solo lined up properly it sounded so much better it the the issue was the solo sounded good out of alignment because the soloist was so strong but once we had nudged it forward a few milliseconds just everything felt a little more natural and it was you know it was my fault but uh this a good way around it is to have the person that recorded the solo send you back an actual recording of them playing the solo over the track just as a reference [Music] at this point you've got all of the audio tracks so the next thing that has to be done is it has to get mixed and honestly i am not a good mixer uh i've tried but you know i'm also not a good trombonist so i would send my trombone one part to be recorded by a trombone specialist why would i try to mix it because let's be honest mixing isn't something you're going to learn how to do from watching a youtube video but by following all these steps you should have everything you need to send to your mix engineers so that they can do a really good job with what they get [Music] [Music] a couple of things that people get hung up on that you probably shouldn't worry about are audio bitrates uh types of microphones people use i'm recording this video on this sm57 i don't generally do videos where i'm talking so this is what i use to record trumpet sounds fine honestly does it sound as good as something fancier no but if you're trying to get the best possible sound you can on a budget get one of these guys this thing is like 40 bucks on amazon makes a big difference as to reducing the room noise that you're probably hearing right now good luck i hope that this helped uh if you have any any follow-up questions i might make a follow-up video if i get enough questions but in the meantime please put your questions uh down below in the comments section feel free to to send me an email go to my website at uh pandemoniumbigband.com definitely click the subscribe button and watch our videos i've watched yours watch mine

Channel: Pandemonium Big Band

Views: 4,363

Keywords: remote, jazz ensemble, jazz band, big band, performance, virtual performance, click track, play along

Id: xMGtLjxNr38

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TodroMcbev]

I'd love to know if anyone else has tried recording remotely with a big band and how did it go?