The vocal part, which was written by Chris Torvill and sang by me, only consisted of 4 lines. I practiced repeating these continuously, but improvised on the melody. He had sent me my part the night before and we went to a studio the following day to record it.
Most of our time in the studio was spent on trying to figure out how to make the Pro Tools rig work, but after asking for help, we managed to set it up properly. Unfortunately we were unable to set the microphone and headphones gain and balance properly and for some reason, there was so much reflection on the voice when listening back to it on the headphones that I had to sing with only one headphone on (otherwise, the echo was louder than the music). Fortunately, the lyrics and soundtrack were repetitive enough for me to improvise on top of them even with a limited feedback of my own voice.
The final mix turned out to be great and the audience, who heard it, complimented my singing on numerous times.
On a negative note, the broadcasting of this sound project commenced without any prior notice or warning, so it took the audience at least 5 minutes of this 20-minute production to even realise it had started (which made it very hard to hear anything up to the point when I started singing and the onlookers finally transformed into listeners) as there was nobody to signal the start of the show. I am using the word “signal” instead of “announce” as “7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through certain vocal elements, and 55% through nonverbal elements (facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc)” (Mehrabian, 1972, 13-17).
I did very politely mention to some of the loudest people that the project had started and that they were welcome to come closer to listen, but I felt like it was not my place to do more than that.
Based on this experience, I learned that:
– Always have a lot of extra time for possible technical problems and failures when in a studio (which luckily Chris and I had reserved for this recording session) and ask help from professionals if time is of essence.
– Always find a host or announce the performance (and introduce performers when needed) to make sure the audience knows what is happening and can respond accordingly.
References:
Mehrabian, A. (1972) Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes. California: Wadsworth Publishing Company.