Chapel Sessions for 23/09/2013

Hi there and welcoem to another entry on this blog about my chapel sessions that happen on a monday night. This week we had an artist in called Richard Watson, who personally, I thought was the UK's version of Tim Minchin. And if you don't know who Tim Minchin is, where have you been? Seriously though, google him. You'll love him. Anyway, we weren't producing this week, we were just observing so we could get a feel of what it is going to be like on a Monday, when we are producing/recording the session for ourselves. We had been breefed about Richard, and his background, which I found quite interesting, and we were told about what was going to happen with regards to set up, live mixing, recording, ETC, and setup began. The cheef engeneer for the night was Paul Cobbald, who was running the mixing desk, and giving Richard directions, EG "let's try that again". The thing I liked about Paul was he didn't hold back on giving Richard Criticism. The RTU's were setting up the equipment, which included 3 microphones, and three cameras (2 static and 1 moving). Paul Cobald was running the sound on the desk, and Dave was opporating the cameras in the chapel; he was being directed by Phill, who was on the tricaster in the studio. Oli was being the floor manager with the clapper board (announcing which take we were on). We were sitting in the control room watching the setup process, and it took ages to get the camera angles and the colour contrast right, but at the same time, Paul was trying to get the audio levels set up so they didn't clip, or weren't too low. He also added some reverb on Richard's vocal mic, but I'm not sure how he did it. Once all was set up, and Richard was comfortable at the piano, we started to record. The first song he sang for us to record was called "I know precisely", which took 5 takes to get right, and then he cmae in to the control room to listen to it back, and when he was happy with it, we moved on to the next one. The next song was called "I'll do it tomorrow", which took 8 takes to get right, because Richard was getting pretty stressed, and kept forgetting the lyrics, and hitting the wrong notes on the piano, but after 8 takes we got there. After that we gave Richard a small break, as he seemed to be getting stressed. Then he performed another song called straight to video, which took 4 takes to get right, and he seemed pretty happy with it. Then it was 7 o'clock, so we had to leave. There were plenty of mistakes made in the hole process, which we all observed, a few of them being with Richard's singing, and a few of them being with different camera angles, but being blind, I can't comment on those. I also observed how quickly everyone worked, and how swiftly the hole process went, apart from a few hitches, but they were quickly ironed out when they happened.