Monday 25 June 2012

Going to the Chapel...

No one likes getting up early on a Saturday. Especially when it is earlier than they would normally get up to go to work.  But this wasn’t any Saturday. This was the Saturday we would record…members of Brasenose College Choir.
My Producer came to pick me up at 8.30am sharp and we headed to Brasenose College. A big thank you must go to Mr David Balch for meeting us there and helping us set up the recording kit in the chapel.  I use the term 'us' very loosley here. I can wind up a cable but I don’t know what the hellah I’m supposed to plug it into. And what does this button do? Oops!

By 10.00am the choir had arrived and we had set up 16 mics and a whole lot of cables and wires. Jonathan Newell, Director of Music at Brasenose, gathered the choir around the piano and they all started humming their parts.  This is the first time I had heard it in person and it was so exciting.  When I thought of recording a choir for the album I imagined making it happen would be very unlikely.  Where am I going to get a choir? Where will we record it? How will I organise this? Who do I think I am? But it did happen and in the most beautiful and authentic setting. 

By 12pm we had managed to record all their parts a number of times so we could layer it on the final recording. This was all captured by Sam King who floated around the room in his socks filming and snapping pictures of the day. You’re going to have to wait a couple of months to hear the full track, but some of the pictures are here and the footage will be up soon to give you a little flavour of the awesomeness that took place that day.  A huge thanks to everyone involved who gave up their time to make this possible, especially the choir who are made up of very busy Brasenose students.







Photographs by Sam King