Like an action packed episode of 24 – we were keenly aware of what can be accomplished in a short time with a couple of entry-level mics, a rehearsal room, some basic home-recording equipment and a Kodak Playsport video camera. Jaydine and James were the Kiefer Sutherland of recording and video production last week as we produced an audition video for Israel & New Breed Africa in under 48 hours.
Jaydine is representing Thatch Music in an audition for the role of musical director and keyboard player for New Breed Africa's African tour.
It began on Tuesday evening around 18h00 when we started arranging the parts and sourcing young and local musical talents to come in and record with us at Jazzworx Studios with Robin Kohl. Jaydine arranged the band parts and James arranged the horn parts, charts were sent out and by early Wednesday afternoon the band spent four hours, take after take, creating a top-class audition video.
Jaydine downloaded a percussion and BV (backing vocals) track from Interactive Worship (which is an awesome resource!) of one of Israel & New Breed’s songs and built up the arrangement from there. This enabled him to incorporate actual New Breed vocalists into the final mix. With his Roland FantomG7, supplied by Anton and Music Connection, he directed the band through the rehearsal, with James taking video footage of every take throughout the session, breaking for two horn takes for which Jaydine manned the camera.
The horns ran two takes – a rehearsal and then the final take which was mixed into the band’s final take, back at Thatch Studios. Using a single video camera meant that James had to edit all the relevant footage into the final audio take in order to create an audition video that was smooth and seamless and highlighted the different parts of the arrangments.
The drums were mic’d with only four mics – kick, snare, toms and floor tom; no overhead mics were used. We used an M-Audio Fastrack Ultra for six separate inputs feeding into an iMac and an M-Audio Projectmix with a 17” MacBookPro for another 8 inputs. The drums, horns, guitars, keys and piano (in stereo) brought us to a total of 13 tracks across the two Apple Macs, both running Logic Pro.
By Thursday the final mixdown was finished, the video was edited to the audio and posted online for the Israel & New Breed audition… and, it was at that point that we realized the auditions had been extended a month, to the middle of October. At least it’s done! Thanks to Sydney Mavundla, Mthunzi Mvubu, David Cousins, Michael Bester, Earl Baartman and Leagan Breda for some awesome music. Thanks also to Anton at Music Connection for all the gear that we used.
Then, our friends at Trilogy Music booked The Sticky Triggers for the Master Builders SA gala dinner at the CTICC in Cape Town, on Saturday night. As an eight-piece function band, the music ranged from background, dinnertime jazz standards to an up-tempo dance set to get the party pumping late into the evening.
This week we’ll be backing Danny K as he performs live on the Idols show. Check out our website or Facebook page for this full story next week.
0 comments:
Post a Comment