Good thing to have done at this point. Recording can be very informative of all the places your skills are lacking. Too informative. Since I'm mixing down in Reaper I have tools at hand that show me just exactly how far off pitch I am, and how far away from the beat I strayed. All those irregularities are mercilessly graphed out in full color right there on the display of the DAW.
Yeah, so much for "simple" string parts. Those long legato lines are murder. I need to spend a lot of practice time just working on clean bowing, silent direction changes, clean starts, etc. And vibrato. My vibrato also needs lots of work.
Related to that, I'm used to practicing. Which means, stopping to find my pitches, stopping for breath, stopping and going back when I drop a note. Can't do that while tape is rolling. One of the unhappy discoveries on this one was while I was rolling the recorder (soprano and tenor) parts in I discovered they were so long I couldn't actually do them on a single breath as I'd been "rehearsing." Because like I said, in rehearsals I stopped when and where I needed to.
Another thing about recording is that it can make it difficult to hear your own instrument. Especially on a project like this, where I'm not memorizing each part over endless practice sessions, I'm dependent on having the temp track playing in my headphones so I can get the notes right. And of course you are listening to the metronome and trying to stay on it. With all that, you tend to miss a lot of errors of intonation and articulation.
Another discovery. It is good to start recording parts early instead of trying to get the MIDI mock-up perfect. I mentioned recorders above; turns out the tenor part was too low for my Low D penny whistle (which is what I'd planned in the mockup.) Fortunately I had that new tenor recorder, never used before, and I think recorders actually work better.
I mentioned earlier that col legno was how I intended to approach one fast, extremely high (C7) part. Well...on the mic, the strike of the wood was overpowering that A string (I was way up in fifth position on it). So went to bowing instead. Which doesn't, really, blend. Similarly, I had a steel-string acoustic guitar in the mock-up but the new tenor ukulele (currently tuned to guitar top four) has a robust enough sound it worked great.
So, yeah. The two pieces on the top of the table right now, I'm going to experiment with the actual instruments earlier in the process. Perhaps unfortunately, they are not "Bardic covers." Instead I'm looking at electric guitar, trumpet, sax...and more violin. And bass, which I did use for the Galaxy Map song...but it was a really, really easy (and not terribly idiomatic) part.
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