On 2/2/07 10:55 AM, "Stuart Holmes" <stumusic@sbcglobal.net> wrote: > This is the direction I'm now leaning in after giving it more > thought. Part of performing in a studio environment is being able > to work in a certain amount of isolation after all, and for the > students would probably be a more novel experience. Stuart I have done a lot of big band sessions with various levels of players (students, amateurs and pros). There are lots of options each has its pros and cons. Having the whole band together in the same room, no headphones, will provide the most comfortable performing experience. It will be just like a regular concert or rehearsal, although you will probably want to separate the sections as much as possible in the room for some degree of isolation. The downside here is for you, the engineer...way too much leakage everywhere. If you are using an acoustic piano it is almost impossible to keep 13 horns out...you can get an OK mix this way, but you will definitely be limited in what you can do. I did a session this way not too long ago, just to keep things simple, and regretted it when it came time to mix. This also doesn¹t really give as much of a studio experience to the students, and makes it difficult to fix individual parts. The best overall solution, for sound and for feel, would be recording all parts at once, but with rhythm section isolated as much as possible. We only have one large Iso booth, so drums go there and I just do what I can with piano. If I am feeling really ambitious I have a couple of small spaces to isolate the guitar and bass amps as well ­ or use gobos. This approach is definitely more complicated, and requires lots of headphones, which you said you didn¹t have. It also will take quite a bit of time getting all the headphones working right. As the other poster has suggested, laying down the rhythm first and bringing in the horns one section at a time can work OK. The feel may or may not suffer, depending on the kind of tune. Once again, it has its pros and cons: It does provide the studio ³experience² for the students, and will give you a very clean recording when it comes to mixing. It will also allow you to overdub solos and fix individual problems easier. On the other side, not only can it be hard for the horns to play just with rhythm ­ it is often even harder for the rhythm to play without horns! These rhythm players will be used to listening to the melodies and won¹t know when to play their shots etc. - unless they are really good, or it is a really simple tune. If you go with this approach make sure the director gets them to practice playing by themselves first. Also, watch for timing problems doing it this way. It is easy to listen to the bed tracks and figure everything sounds OK ­ then when you go to add the horn parts some things just don¹t fit ­ somebody played a rhythm wrong or rushed. Here a click track can help...lots of folks hate using a click on jazz, but if the band is having problem with time it may be a life saver. This may be really hard for students unless they practice doing it first ­ have the director spend some rehearsal time playing a click for the band. It will be good practice and they will be used to it when the time comes to record. One possibility is to lay down a few scratch horn tracks ­ a trumpet, bone and a couple of saxes to let the rhythm hear the melody. But now you are up to 8 sets of phones again! Plus, this approach will almost certainly take much longer, so it depends on how much time is available. I have had decent results with all three of these approaches, let us know what you decide. HTH Blair Oh yeah, I do this in Logic (back On Topic) -- blairfisher@shaw.ca ----------------------------------------------------------------- Group Buy until Feb 22nd for Virtual Instruments Magazine! See http://logic-users.org/groupbuy/vimag for full details.