4 Part Music Blog

The most common question I am asked when talking about 4 Part Music as a recording company is “Where is your studio based?”.

The answer “We don’t have a studio” is usually met with some surprise as the expectation is that a recording company has a studio from which it records.  This of course is often the case. Over the years we have often wondered about investing in a studio – perhaps partly to have an answer to this question!

But, in business it is important to be very clear about your aims and position in the market. 4 Part Music has been set up to work “on location”.  The primary reason of course is that our target market is made up of choirs and organists and such musicians do not lend themselves to being recorded in a studio. For such recordings the Church, Cathedral or School Chapel becomes the studio.   This means therefore that we carry around all the equipment you would normally house in a studio.

The most challenging part of the setup is the venue itself. As churches vary in shapes and sizes we have to adapt our setup accordingly. This is where a multi mic technique is crucial.   We have to ensure we capture the choir, the organ and the acoustic – assuming there is one.  Where this matters most is when we come to master the recording.  Our aim is to always be in a position where we can rebalance the sound in accordance with the musical directors wishes.  This could be a case of, more choir, less organ or taking out some of the acoustic.  Obviously, unless we have recorded all these elements separately as well as together we would be unable to do this.

Even where we are recording an organ on it’s own we still follow a similar principle of recording the instrument as well as the acoustic.  The biggest danger of any on location recording is that microphone placement has to be determined for each different location.  Get it wrong and you can either end up with a recording which sounds like it was done in a cupboard or even worse sounding too distant as if the microphones were left outside in the car park.

I have spent the last week singing the services at Durham Cathedral with the choir Schola Aquae Sulis.  This choir is made up of largely professional musicians or at the least extremely competent singers who get together once a year to spend a week in residence at a Cathedral. This year was the turn of Durham to be our host.

I will post seperately about the music later but in general it is a combination of fairly standard cathedral repertoire with a few challenges thrown in to the mix. We sang evensong every day with the exception of Friday which was our day off and gave us a chance to explore the Durham countryside.   On Sunday we sang 3 services, matins, eucharist and evensong.

Because the choir only meets once a year the rehearsals are extremely focused from the start although the musicianship of the choir means that there is very little “note bashing” with most of the time time being spent on “polish” as Dr Ben Cliffe (the choirs Music Director) likes to say! Despite this there is generally ample time to visit the Cathedral restaurant for tea and cake. As an aside I can say the cakes at Durham Cathedral are extremely good!