When we built this new building, we didn't have any idea that this kind of year would ever happen. Our new band room wasn't equipped to record ensemble sound. The new technology that came with the room has enabled us to accomplish a lot, but we still needed some new pieces to actually do all of this. So, we researched and ended up purchasing some new recording equipment.

Our microphones (which you see in pictures below) are Blue Yeti X microphones. Although they are primarily designed for podcasting and streaming, they are versatile microphones which are capable of recording for a wide variety of purposes. We used two of them to create a stereo (double) recording set up. This will pull audio from the left and right sides of the ensemble to simulate the sound that human ears on the sides of our head will hear.

Each microphone is plugged into a computer which is recording into Audacity, a general purpose recording software. You will see in the image below that one of the microphones is plugged into the classroom touch panel. This lets us see and monitor our sound while we play and record. The other microphone connected to a laptop.

• Why are the microphones so high in the air? - When recording large ensembles like our bands, you always place the microphones high in the air. This lets the microphone "hear" everyone in the room, rather than just the front row. A safe rule of thumb is that "If you can see it, you can hear it." A microphone placed higher in the air can "see" more people in the room.

• Why use two microphones? - As mentioned above, using 2 microphones helps to recreate the stereo sound that people hear all the time...because we have 2 ears! This kind of setup will create a more realistic soundscape for the listener.

Once we had the room set up to record, we had to learn and practice some new procedures to get everything set up correctly. Band rooms are typically noisy and busy all the time, which isn't really ideal for this kind of recording task. The students had to make some changes to our procedures, and we all had to learn some new tricks to make sure that everything went smoothly.

1. Setting the microphone gains - In one of the pictures below, you'll see our sound engineer and videographer Tristan monitoring the volume of the band on the recording screen. A new step to warming up the band at the beginning of class is to make sure we have our microphones set at the perfect gain. This means that the microphone is set to be sensitive enough to pick up all the detail in the recorded sound, but isn't so loud that the recording peaks, which is where it gets too loud and sounds distorted. The students learned about these industry-standard vocabulary terms and how to set the levels correctly. Because Tristan is recovering from a hand injury, we asked him to help us get levels set every day for recording.

2. Gathering "room tone" - When you record in a space, the microphone is always going to pick up the background noise of the room: the buzzing of light fixtures, the hum of air conditioning vents, the whisper of air circulating through the room, etc... When we record, we want to get rid of that distracting "background" noise. To do this, we started each recording with a few seconds of silence. The final recordings have this silence edited out, but during the process, we are able to use our software to highlight the silence with the "room tone" in it, and tell the software to remove it. Audacity (the software we use) is smart enough to learn what the background noise sounds like and remove it from each track. This creates a cleaner result. You can see an example of recorded room tone below.

The final stage of producing a recording is called "mastering" the recording. This is when an audio engineer works with the raw recording data to make slight adjustments in order to improve the audio quality of the final result. That often times means removing background noise and interference (using the room tone we recorded earlier), adjusting the EQ balance to make sure that all the instruments can be heard clearly, and then adding subtle effects like reverb to recreate the experience of listening to the recording in a real concert hall.

We used Audacity to record our audio and actually used it to handle noise reduction as well. It is well designed for taking a room tone example and eliminating noise.

Logic Pro X is an industry-standard program that is used to handle all sorts of tasks that involve editing audio. It is a "heavy-hitter" piece of software that can handle large workloads. Some of the largest music studios you can find will use this program. We first used it to synchronize our two microphones. Because we wanted to record in stereo (meaning with a left and a right audio track), we had to line them up perfectly to get them in sync. Logic allowed us to line up the two individual tracks, and then shift them around to get them in sync. How did we get them perfectly lined up? That's a trick we learned: clapping once at the beginning of a track gave us a checkpoint to use. You can see an image of two synchronized tracks below. Look for the "clap" at the beginning to see what we aimed for!

We also used Logic Pro X to adjust our EQ levels first. The "flat" recording emphasizes each frequency of sound equally; the highest instruments are given as much importance as the lowest ones. We can improve the clarity of the recording by strategically and subtly adjusting those levels so that the instruments are given appropriate emphasis. Small changes make a big difference here. Below, you will see an example of the EQ levels after we adjusted them.

Reverb is another word for echo. A nice performance space like our auditorium has a small amount of echo that helps the sound to blends together. Concert halls are very carefully designed by audio engineers and architects to make sure that the sound produced on stage gets mixed and moved around the room to the listeners' ears without being distorted. The band room doesn't have as much special treatment...it's designed for practice and rehearsal and not for performance. As such, we have to take some extra care to give our raw recorded data the same special treatment. Logic Pro X has some excellent reverb presents that can give the sound that sense of blend and echo that you hear in a real room. We selected a preset which was subtle but still effective, then fine-tuned it down to exactly where we wanted it.