One of my new favorite things..
Choir sound is different
Over the last year, Keri and I have been working on a choir sound. We got some things, read some things, and went to town on experiments. We got in the garage. We got the closet. We even tried the shower. We just did a job for a cool song from Scotland by Andrew Anderson, coming soon. We feel good about the choir sound now. I wanted to talk concepts about making good choir in your songs.
Disclaimer:
First off, both Keri and I grew up in protestant church choir and that has a lot to do with our sound. We are not trained, we just showed up. My concept of choir might be slightly different than yours if you have never sung at vacation bible school, or a funeral, or a wedding.
If you were a dozen people, it would be really loud.
I learned by placing different mics in different rooms that the nicer mics get to do their thing in large spaces. I found this crucial for making convincing choir tracks. The room had to be bigger than my normal tracking space.
The mic I am currently using for these kinds of tracks is the Myrtle by Ear Trumpet labs. The Myrtle picks up from 3 feet away like nothing. So I put it in a large room, imagining the sound going out in front and not being able to bounce back to the mic. Huge space. Garage works. A hallway gives interesting and notable results. The small insulated room isn’t even usable here. I would have to change mics.
It has to move.
So I have my big space and I set my mic, it never moves through the whole process. But Keri and I move a ton. I have a taped out semi circle, 4 X’s, we’ll take turns. No choir we have done before sounds good up on a smaller mic, standing in the same spot. But the choir tracks have movement and realism if we stand in 4 or 5 different spots. For Andrew, we did 2 groups of 4 spots. Each.
This works for other instruments too. If you play strings, put the cello, bass, viola, and violin, in all different spots. I’d probably just go with a semicircle there too. But you can get a little crazy…
A fabulous way to learn your mics.
Maybe you have a big room with a little closet. Experiment with standing in the closet, facing the room, singing or playing. With the Myrtle, I get very usable sound this way. But I also get it with the SM58 too. Now turn the operation around. Stand in the room, face the closet, see what happens. I think this helps me with mic placement everywhere, just having done it at home. By doing this, I can echolocate places for microphones better. I have a hearing memory of their reaction to different size spaces. Muscle memory is talked about a lot in other jobs.. I use a lot of hearing memory.
Now do it with multiple distances away and to the side of that mic. You might not realize it, but you are building a choir!
Small set up, large space.
Choir tracks need space, an ensemble mic, an iPad, an interface. It is not necessary to try to force tracking at the house when you can borrow a church’s sanctuary to track vocals. We have. We’ve tracked whole live songs in churches too. Tiny donation, they open the doors. The nice mics love it. They can breathe.
Choir coming on The Kintners record out Christmas.
This time we wanted to try at the house since we are recording a double-album ourselves. Andrew got us off our butts about the choir. Glad he did. I think we have it worked out. One less thing to worry about for the record, choir.
Kelly Kintner