Recording Singers For Anti-Racism Song In Harmony
After I finished recording all the musical instrument tracks plus all of my vocals last summer, it was time to bring in other singers to add their voices to our anti-racism song In Harmony. Janine and Simona were the first singers to come in to add to my existing vocals during the fall months of 2021. Then during the winter, Hana, Zahra, Queenie and Michelle all came into the studio to sing as well.
Each singer had to come in twice to record. The first recording session had each singer just singing the chorus and background parts of In Harmony. Usually I had every singer warm up first and then when ready, sang each chorus of the song non-stop for four to five times. This way we had four to five separate takes of each part which allowed me to select the best performances from all of these takes to create a single best overall take. This was done for all background parts as well as harmony parts of the song as well.
Most singers opted to listen to my existing vocal tracks while they sung but I gave them the choice of just singing without hearing my voice too. For harmony parts, we muted the main melody lines so that singers only heard my harmony tracks while they recorded. This way they got to know each harmony part without getting confused with the main melody line.
Sometimes I had singers repeat the recording for certain parts of the song so we ended up with double tracks, one for the left side of the audio and one for the right. Again, each recorded vocal track ended up with at least four different takes as we wanted more to choose from, ie. better to have more recorded vocals than too little since we all at times had issues with timing and keeping on tune all the time.
Amazing Experience Recording In A Studio
For most of the singers, this was the first time ever recording in a studio. The vocal sound booth I built could fit only one person at a time so whenever we had more than one singer here, the other one would have to wait outside the booth staying pretty quiet until it was her turn to record. Usually by the time each singer finished singing enough parts for the chorus and background tracks, it would be about 30 to 40 minutes of singing in the sound booth. I noticed each singer’s voice started to dry up so we would call it quits by this time.
Although many singers can keep on singing for the duration of a live concert performance, the recording studio is much more sensitive in picking up when singers’ voices start to crack. And this was usually at about the 30-40 minute mark which is why we did only chorus and background parts for the first recording session. Singers came back for a second session to record the verses of the song.
Here’s a quick video showing how we captured each singer’s voice into our recording system.
All of our singers felt they had an amazing experience with studio recording and they were impressed with how the recording process worked as they were able to hear their recorded tracks afterwards. I found it interesting to see how each singer found just which parts of the song could be sung with a higher or lower voice. There were definitely some experimentation time going on as each singer found out that some parts of the song were either too low or too high for their vocal ranges and had to sing them either an octave lower or higher in order to keep in tune and not strain their vocal chords. Sometimes singers realized that they could sing only certain parts of the song well but that was okay since we had a total of seven singers including myself to contribute to this song.
After each singer finished a recording session, I had to spend a lot of time on Logic X software to edit each singer’s recorded tracks to fix up any timing and pitch issues whenever possible. Although this is a long, pain staking process, the end results are very satisfying.
Janine and Michelle loved recording so much that they returned to sing on other songs as part of the Unity Power Force music project. Queenie and Janine will be coming back to sing on some of our foreign language versions of In Harmony and we’ll have other new singers on those as well.
