Recording Assignment Process

Recording Assignment Process

For this recording assignment, We invited a piano musician to record at the music building in the University of sydney.The solo musician chose J Joseph Haydn. Because of the limitation of the duration of the total recording, we chose the chapter from 1 to 121. Firstly, we realized that each small mistakes on performances would influence the completeness of the entire song. Therefore, to insure the flexibility of the recording, we divided the thole selected part into 4 parts named from A to D.

The sequence is shown as below:

A part : 1 to 17

B part : 18 to 35

C part : 36 to 67

D part : 68 to 121

For our recording plan, we decided to record the entire song firstly and then record each part separately. The piano to be performed is the vertical piano that we consider and tired lots of location and method to set up the recording equipment with small stand. As the structure of the vertical shown, we tried to place the recording above the top of the piano with the opening top board. The reason to place the recording here was to record the sound from  bass strings clearly. However, we found that the the equipment record the slightly noise sound occurred by the knock from the small stand and the top board.

Then we changed to the long stand moved to the front to record on the floor. After checking the final recording, we found that there are also some noise recorded by the friction between fingernail and the keyboard. Next, to solve the problem, we would like to change the long stand to the behind. However, the limitation of  environment space, we could not achieve that. At last, we put the recording equipment on the bottom of piano on the floor with small stand near the performer feet. Because the recording has to ensure the balance on both left and right track, we adjusted the equipment in the middle of the piano to record the omnibearing sound.

After finishing all recording, I would like to edit the song by Adobe Audition. Firstly, I would like to discover the most flexible and completely recording demo to consist the song. To minimise performance errors and avoid difficult mistakes to deal, I chose the clips from different recording results both the entire performance and separate performance. When I built the whole song structure, I found that there are clear noisy during the listening expect the friction between fingernail and keyboard. Therefore, the most important things were that I had to reduce the noise. Then I chose the part of the simple noise sound and capture noise print. Next, I selected all clips in the track and changed the noise reduction process. During this step, I payed attention on the sense of the reality of the piano sound that not changed the sound a lot.

However, our recording artist is not the professional musician. Although there are some problem with the tempo and performing speed, she had tired her best to perform. Also, there were clear sounds when fingernails knocked the keyboard before I edited. But after edited, although there were no fingernails clicked sounds, the quality of the song with the piano sound still changed a little bit that I have controlled the level of the noise reduction.

The scan of the track sheet: