Weekly Update 3, in which we start laying down the instrumentals, and I learn the strings.
The Project. Two weeks ago our family embarked on a new pilot project, creating a multi-track music recording from three bases - our master studio in Tucson, Arizona, our daughter Rosie & her husband James' satellite studio in Okcheon, South Korea, and our daughter Sonja & her husband Eboy's satellite studio in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo.
The Strings. The original song was on John Denver’s 1971 album, “Poems, Prayers, & Promises.” The original didn’t have any strings. But in 1974 he gave a concert at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, California, and he had hired Lee Holdridge to orchestrate the music and to conduct the orchestra. Lee Holdridge took an already beautiful, touching song and made it a hymn of love and longing for home. When I hear it, it grabs hold of my heart and refuses to let go.
Rosie and Sonja in Yosemite with their Grandma Green, 1987
Maybe it affects me like it does because when I was young and living at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, “An Evening with John Denver” (the recording of that concert) was the soundtrack to my frequent trips up into the mountains.
Russell in Yosemite with his Grandpa Green, 1995
Whatever the reason, our recording is going to have strings, and I’m going to play them as closely to Lee Holdridge’s orchestration as I reasonably can on a keyboard.
Getting the contour of the moving string parts (writing it directly into ForScore).
The Technology. The hardware we are using is a Focusrite 18i20 (18 inputs, 20 outputs). This machine is the interface between the voices & instruments and the computer. The software we are using is Ableton Light. The Focusrite came with several recording software packages, one of which was Ableton Light. We chose Ableton Light because of the ease of sharing, importing, and exporting files.
The Focusrite hardware and the Ableton software
We’ve encountered some challenges with the Ableton Light software. The software requires a powerful processor, Pentium i5 to i7. The computer we are using has an i3 and it is working fine. Our daughter is Korea has a Macbook with i7, however, our daughter in Borneo has an older PC laptop with a dual core processor that does not meet the minimum requirements. This is causing skips and stutters in the recording quality due to the drain on the CPU.
In Borneo, one does not just up and buy a new computer. So our option is to reduce the demand on the CPU by closing every other program, including WiFi (every program that automatically opens on startup). If this does not work, we will have to find an older software that is compatible and demands less power.
Another challenge is that Ableton Light only has 8 tracks. This means that there will be a lot of pinging from multiple tracks mixed down to one track in order to free up those tracks again. For instance, we record individual instruments onto the first 7 tracks, then send them to track 8. We now can rerecord over tracks 1-6, and send them to track 7. You see where this is going, right?
Each time we send multiple tracks to a single track, it must be mixed down. After that (with the exception of adding effects), the track cannot be modified.
A possible solution is to buy Ableton Standard, which comes with unlimited tracks, but we don’t know whether Ableton Standard is compatible with Ableton Light. We know that Ableton Standard can open files from Ableton Light, but we don’t know if the reverse is true.
Stay Tuned. Will this project come to a standstill? Will we have to spend more money? Stay tuned for more heart-stopping suspense as this technodrama unfolds!
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