Recording - August 2020 - 41

You're the only person so far that
I've talked to that actually did their
own audio and video. 

Once I had everything lined up and
organized, I sent sections to their own
buses-string bus, horn bus, backup vocals... Then I balanced the levels among
similar instruments, favoring the ones
that were recorded the cleanest, and I
would bury the ones that sounded noisy
or had a crappy phone sound. After balancing the sections, I used the VLA-2A
leveling amp from Black Rooster Audio
to keep each bus in check. I used just
a little bit of leveling, nothing that hardcore. Then I sent most of the sections to
an Arturia Plate Reverb that they gave
away for free last Christmas, to flesh
them out a little bit. 

How did you mix 60 tracks and not
overwhelm yourself?

Beyond just the leveling app and the
plate reverb, I actually brought up a seating chart for a symphony orchestra, and I
tried to pan the instruments as they would
be if you were in a concert hall. There's a
lot of placements that I would have never
thought to make, but it worked to keep
things out of each other's way.

Did you need to cut any parts out to
make things work?

I did automate the levels a bit, mostly
to get things out of the way of the vocals. But since I wrote the arrangements,
I worked them so that it wasn't ever too
busy, so I didn't really have to cut parts
or do any crazy mixing. I did highpass a
lot of things just to cut room rumble and

THE

Did you experience any timing or
intonation issues with the strings?

PROVIDE AMAZING RESULTS ON VOCALS, PIANO,

Not so much timing, but some intonation, especially the highest string parts
like violin one. That's where the intonation can be a little dicey.

How did you fix that?

I think I might've used a pitch correction plugin for one instance of the violin,
just to nudge it in tune. But for the most
part, if something was wildly out of tune,
I just dumped it, not the whole part, but
just a single note here and there.

I'm assuming with that many
tracks, you're not going to notice
if one note goes away for two seconds.

Exactly. Going back a little bit, that's
why when people sent in files, I insisted
on multiple instances of every part to reinforce them, so they sound robust.

What advice do you have for others,
or even yourself, now that you have
a few of these under your belt?

If I do this again, I'll add a really long
count in so that the musicians have plenty of time to reset, and not be fumbling
with their instruments as the song starts,
and I'll have the musician snap or clap
so I can sync their part easier.
Make sure your arrangement is as
clean and legible as it can be before
you send it out to everyone. Make sure
you have a rock-solid reference with
pitch and tempo. If you're piecing it all
together, you'll have string players playing by themselves without any reference
to the rest of the section-they'll need a
reference for concert pitch. Other than
that, have a system for how you organize the clips as you get them in-it'll
make your job a lot easier down the
line. File naming goes a long way when
you're trying to put together a 60-piece
quarantined orchestra.
'Can't Get Out Your Own Way' by
Ben Pirani: youtu.be/dvlH0BoTD7E
'For My Friend' by Bill Withers:
youtu.be/UhRJauAc9Hg

RECORDING August 2020

41

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I work in Logic Pro X, and everyone
who used a DAW sent me audio clips
that matched the ones I sent, so the end
points lined up. The other ones I had to
ear match, and I did the same with lining up the video. Luckily, there were a
few good transient points I could match
to, and thankfully in the Bill Withers
song, there's a staccato note pretty close
to the top of the song, and almost every
instrument across the board hits it. Unfortunately, there were a few folks who
gave me their parts piecemeal and not
a full take, so those required a lot of ear
matching and reading waveforms.

PELUSO P-414

the low-end nonsense from recording on
smartphones. Again, unless a track was
really rough, I did most stuff on the bus
level and not so much on the track level.

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Recording - August 2020

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