Childrens' Choir Song - Please Review

  • Thread starter Thread starter dastrick
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dastrick

dastrick

huh???
Here's a song from a Childrens' Choir Christmas Musical that I recorded. The choir consists of about 20-25 kids ranging in age from 12-16 with a piano accompaniment.

I miked the choir with a pair of Behringer C2 sdc's in an XY configuration about 4 feet above the director. The soloist was mic'd with an SM58. I'm not sure what the piano was mic'd with.:( Everything went through and Allen & Heath GL2200. I used 2 Aux sends to send a stereo signal to a Tascam CC-222 CD recorder. I did some very light editing (eq, light compression, & stereo enhancer) in Cubase Essential 4.

I ran FOH and did the recording. You can hear toward the end of the song where the solo started off a little too low. There wasn't much rehearsal time before the show. The music is not professional by any means, but please try to overlook that and let me know about the levels and overall sound. Any advice and comments are appreciated.

Thanks so much, :)

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=911887
Home School Track 9-2
 
Well it sounds fine on these cheapo computer speakers. Was that...somebody coughing @1.35..? :) Perhaps a subtle edit required there. The choir sound good I thought. The piano wasn't boomy and sat well. The guy doing the solo @ 2.00 needs to hit those notes though
 
Sounds very sweet. Nice sound on the vocals...of course it's the singing. But the production is good too. Is there some little kid in the audience chatting? I wonder what you could do about the cough, if you wanted to. Some solo singer in the second verse region is a bit loud, or a bit of a rough singer. No offence at all to the singer, he's just a kid.
 
Aw, warmed my heart and made me feel all fuzzy inside. I love kids' choirs. Thought the production was very good, actually. You captured the piano and singing equally in balance and I thought the sound was great. As with the others, I could have probably done without the kid talking in the audience, but what are you gonna do? Live performances go that way.

Very nice in my opinion. Thanks for posting!
 
It's really hard to tell production wise how this is. When recording choirs, the thing that makes the biggest difference is how good the choir sounds.

While going to school, I worked as a sound engineer where I recorded choirs with a piano or organ twice a week, so I know some of the difficulties in getting good production. My biggest problem was always dealing with the piano bleeding into the choir mics. Not much you can do about that.

I have a couple of suggestions:

1) The choir sounds like it's panned a little too far out. At least, on headphones, I feel like I can hear distinct voices coming from either side. If you have the choice in the future, I would suggest using more mic's on the choir, probably 4 or so, so you can get a wide stereo spread without distinct left/right.

2) The solo vocal feels like it doesn't quite fit in. I think it has too much low end and feels too close. I think I would probably cut some of the low end and bring it up louder. You may possibly want to add some reverb to it if you can get the reverb to match the rest of the natural reverb, but that might be pretty hard to do.

Sounds pretty good. Makes me want to record a choir again, but I'm pretty sure I'll never have that opportunity again.
 
Thanks...

Thank you all for the comments and suggestions.

I wasn't very happy with the solo, but there's very little that I can do about it now. It was all recorded in stereo. That was a case of not rehearsing so I could set levels and eq.

And that kid talking...I tried to wrap duct tape around his mouth, but his mom put up a pretty good fight. :p
 
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