A guide to recording sessions

You’re investing a lot in the recording process, or maybe you’re lucky enough to have funding. Either way, you owe it to yourself to take full advantage of the session, and that can’t happen if you’re underprepared. If you’re bringing new repertoire, make sure it’s practiced thoroughly and sung in, and that you’ve had a chance to rehearse it with a pianist (ideally with whomever will be playing for the recording). If you’re bringing things you’ve been auditioning with for years, go back to the score, make sure bad habits haven’t crept in, but also find something new in each piece to get excited about and bring some freshness to your performance. You don’t want your videos to come across as ‘routine’.

A performance isn’t just musical. Prepare your visual interpretation - your staging/acting. Pay attention to your movements, gaze targets, gestures, and work with a mirror to get those as consistent as possible (more on that later).

Speaking of visuals, if there’s filming involved, think of what you’ll wear. It’s up to you whether you keep it casual, smart casual, or super-glam; but there are some considerations you may not think of yourself. Colour-coordination with your surroundings, for instance. If you’re recording against a black backdrop, wearing black will result in a video that’s quite… black. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, white shirts are tricky for cameras to expose for and compensating for that can affect the resulting brightness of your video. 

Outside of your own preparation, make sure your accompanist has access to your sheet music in advance, marked up with any relevant ornaments/cadenzas/breaths/tempo fluctuations. Book in a rehearsal a few days before the session, if you can. This will pay dividends!

Make sure the venue you’re booking is also prepped and ready - ask about the piano tuning schedule and maybe book in a tuner. Make sure you won’t be interrupted by any day-to-day goings on at the venue. It may be worth asking for signage to be put in place informing employees and visitors that there’s a recording in progress.

If you’re planning to record video, making a few practice recordings (even without accompaniment) will let you try out various camera angles you might want to use, and see how you come across visually.

For some arias or sections you may want a close-up portrait shot with you delivering straight to camera, for others a half-profile wide shot may be more appropriate. Do your character’s eyes stay fixed in one place, or do you need to plan a few different focus spots to look at over the course of the scene?

All you’ll need is a smartphone and maybe a stand for it, so this is a low-cost way of elevating your video prep.

Ok, you can’t plan your illnesses in advance, nor can you guarantee you’ll be on 100% form on a given day. However, a recording is an investment and an endeavour that involves multiple people (the pianist, the recordist, the venue). If you suffer from illness in the run up to the recording date, it’s good practice to give everyone a heads up. It may be safer to rebook the whole thing rather than take a chance on how quickly you’ll recover, but this is much easier to do with some time to spare. If you delay the decision until the last moment, chances are you’ll be liable to pay cancellation fees to various parties. Being upfront about the state of your health gives everyone a chance to plan contingencies - perhaps you can hand the session over to a friend (or line them up just in case), or the recordist can find another client who could use the booking.

This follows on from, and feeds into preparation. Be aware that recordings can be studied forensically, meaning that minor blips that would pass for nothing in an audition will be embedded in the recording for all to judge. We’d like to hope that our target audience will be kind and not get hung up on minor imperfections, and to a large degree those tiny flaws actually give your performance a ‘real live’ quality. However, it’s best to aim for maximum accuracy and quality, so you don’t find your recording riddled with intonation issues, vague coloratura, underpowered upbeats, or off-the-voice pianissimi. The top notes, climactic passages, or ornamented da capi will probably take care of themselves, as those are naturally the bits we tend to practice the most. It’s a good idea to record yourself on whatever equipment you have to hand to double-check the ‘less important’ bits, though, and make sure you are, in fact, singing every note properly.

As you’re laying down smaller takes (patches, or sections, rather than whole performances), make sure you give yourself a run-in and run-out and treat both of those as equally important as the meat of what you’re hoping to accomplish in a take. The editor will thank you for supplying the overlap that will allow them to stitch in the patch without it being blindingly obvious. Cutting from a passionate performance to something that is obviously starting from scratch (neutral face, bored eyes, relaxed posture) will never look good. 

If something does go slightly pear-shaped (a rough onset, small crack, or the odd intonation slip), don’t let it show in your face. Keep performing. Chances are it’ll be fixable in post, as long as it doesn’t look like you’ve done something you’re unhappy with. The performance does not stop until 10 seconds after the cameras have stopped rolling!

At whatever stage you may be at technically, the recording session is not a lesson or coaching. It is a performance, albeit a staggered one where you can try again. It’s easy to get caught up in how to sing technically better from take to take, and while it may be useful to practice a phrase technically, you don’t want to be thinking about technique when the cameras are rolling. Trust that your preparation will stand you in good stead, and deliver the best performance you can on the day. No one wants to watch your technique, they want a performance. Do whatever you need to do in order to deliver one. If that means putting your last language coaching out of your mind, or politely asking your engineer or teacher (if you’ve brought them along) to stop giving you notes, so be it. You know what you need, trust your gut, leave the technical minutiae where they belong - in the practice room.

Recording is tiring. There will be times when you realise your plan to record 4 pieces was a touch too ambitious. That’s ok. It’s better to walk away with one good recording than 4 poor ones. Be kind to yourself, rest in between takes, and don’t try to power through at all costs. With experience, you’ll learn what your recording pace is and how much you’re likely to get done in a session. Until you gather that experience, though, err on the side of caution, give yourself more time or plan to record less repertoire (do bring bonus pieces just in case).

Be consistent in singing every note, sure, but I also mean consistency in the little things that no one thinks of until it’s too late - the things that are easily forgotten or overlooked as you get into the swing of recording. Your hair, clothes, make up, sweat build up. Check a mirror (or your phone) before each take. Ask other people in the room, as long as you’ve given them a baseline (it’s no good asking someone ‘do I look the same’ if you never asked them to take a good look at you in the first place). The recordist has enough to be keeping an eye on without worrying about continuity, but they are there if you need them. Watch a take back if you need to, even if it may be very time consuming to find the relevant video material.

Be consistent in your physicality - facial expressions, gestures, where you look, etc. If you’re a great natural performer, the temptation will be to wing it. Resist, or you’ll end up having to use whole takes (no bad thing!) or live with the fact your left hand is raised one moment, and in the next shot it’s your right hand. 

In terms of physical performance, there are only two satisfactory options - golden takes (it may seem like a dream, but with enough preparation it is an absolutely achievable one); or disciplined consistency. Anything that falls short of either of those risks being obviously cut together. That’s not to say the resulting videos won’t be good! But they will be more in the highly-produced-music-video camp (and casual viewers will probably enjoy them greatly), rather than the audition-tape one (where a casting director might be doubtful you can deliver as solid a performance in just one go). 

This one might be counterintuitive, but it stems from the technical aspects of the recording process. Microphones are often quite directional in how they pick up your voice, while cameras will be offering a perspective that is more close up than in most performance scenarios. Without writing a big article on the intricacies of microphone technique for singers / instrumentalists, in short - if you sing at the mic you will probably sound better than if you sing off to the side. It’s in the interest of both sound quality and the look of the video if you don’t move too much during the recording and direct your performance in a focussed direction. This doesn’t mean you need to be rooted to the spot and look fixedly in one place, there’s a bit of flexibility, but if you’ve planned on having choreography in your video and singing from side to side… you may need to rethink things if you want your recordings to look/sound their best.

Ultimately, these are your recordings. Technology is there to help, as are recordists and editors, but what you should be aiming for is for them to be there to enhance what you’re delivering, not make up for your shortcomings.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post entitled How to survive recordings, and I have to say, while I stand by the body of the text, the title doesn’t exactly convey a winning mindset. All of the above is important, but amounts to nothing if you don’t have fun. Yes, recordings can be expensive, stressful, revealing, but they can also be your best chance to truly present your own version of a piece, free from the judging eyes of an audition panel, or the overbearing vision of a director/MD. You can perform your pieces the way you feel them, and that should be a joyful experience. So put the work in beforehand, treat the session itself as a gift to yourself, and remember - if you aren’t happy with the results, no one needs to see them! It’ll still have been worth doing on many levels.