The Road To Europa: Berlin Audio

Christian Betz sets up the microphone for Daniel while recording in Dresden

Recording engineer Christian Betz sets up the microphone for Daniel while recording in Dresden

Join us Tuesday July 5 for KlezFactor’s Europa CD Release at Supermarket (268 Augusta Ave.) in Toronto!

The day has arrived and the CDs are in. Europa releases tonight but the road to creating it doesn’t stop at the end of our Europa Tour that concluded on July 31, 2015 in Prague.

After an extra day in the Czech Republic, Paromita and I headed back to Berlin. Christian Betz had sent me a rough mix of the recording sessions including the concert in Dresden to listen to. This is an important phase of the recording process where I have to decide which takes are going to be the tracks that we end up working with. We had close to four hours of audio to work with that was eventually pared down to make the 52-minute Europa album. Paromita had some work to do as well and we parked ourselves at one of my favourite Berlin cafes, Mein Haus am See in Rosenthaler Platz, to download the mixes and just chill while I listened.

How does one decide on which take to use? It has a lot to do with the most important elements being clean, having to “fix” as little as possible (to make for less work later) but it also has a lot to do with the particular energy in a particular take. Sometimes there’s just something about the way a performance feels that makes it “the one” for a particular song. Other times, there are messy sections that are salvageable with editing and the right mixing. After a marathon listening section, I had selected the tracks to use and made an appointment to meet Christian and Daniel at his studio, Berlin Audio, in town.

I spent the first couple of hours in the morning recording some clarinet and saxophone lines either replacing things I’d screwed up or adding depth, layers and harmonies to other parts. When we recorded the way we did, there was plenty of “bleed” between the tracks, meaning that you can hear the drums or guitar or violin on the clarinet track and you can hear the clarinet on other tracks.

Daniel arrived later and began working his magic, replacing lines that weren’t as clean as they could have been and adding layers to other tracks. When all that was done, Christian copied the tracks to my hard drive and our business was done!

The next step? Take the tracks back to Toronto, acquire the necessary software to start mixing the album and doing some additional recording and get things rolling!

 

“Like” us on Facebook!

Europa is released July 5, 2016! Join us at our CD release concert!

Head over to our Performances page for updates on concerts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *