Weekly Update #5, in which we run into even more challenges!
January in Summerhaven. We took immense pleasure in watching Eboy experience snow.
For those just visiting my blog, a brief description of this project is as follows: our family has enjoyed making (and recording) music since, well, forever. Now our oldest child is married and living in South Korea, and our middle child is married and living in Malaysian Borneo. Our project involves creating a recording across the Pacific Ocean and (if we want to get really specific) the South China Sea.
The Challenge: This is a challenge that we thought we had figured out - the latency problem. When the girls sent their .wav files back to us their voices were as much as a measure ahead of the instrumental track. But it turns out that my husband is nothing if not persistent. He took the problem to the internet and discovered that we were not the only Ableton users to encounter this problem.
It turns out that the problem is actually a feature of Ableton, and it works really well with rhythm tracks, but not with vocal tracks. Here is a screenshot of the feature in question.
The feature I circled - Auto-Warp Long Samples - works for rhythm tracks but not vocal tracks.
For some reason the default setting of the "Auto Warp Long Samples" feature is "on." This feature is mostly to help sync files that have a lot of percussion rhythmically to the other files within the project. But for files that don't have specific rhythm markers (like a voice), it will play slightly off-beat or out of sync. We learned that we definitely wanted this feature turned off, and when we did that it fixed the problem. Yay Tony for being persistent and finding the solution to our greatest challenge so far!
Another vocal challenge: This is the first time we have recorded our vocal parts without being in the same room and being able to cue off each other. Differing vocal styles conflicted, especially related to consonants and cutoffs. I took on the role of "choir director," and provided all singers a recording of their parts and asked them to practice them along with a "template" recording as a model.
The Benefits: These challenges had the hidden benefit of everyone getting more familiar with the hardware and software. As terms and vocabulary related to the recording process became more fluent, communication improved between all involved.
The Music: You know I'm all about the strings. I love the strings, what can I say?
Mama lays down the strings, and all is right with the world.
So Tony laid down guitar and a pretty convincing Dobro, Russell laid down the drums, and I added the strings. We (Tony) resolved the syncing problem with the voices.
Coming Up: James adds his banjo. Everybody adds vocals. Stay tuned!
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