Around 80 musicians, a 24-piece women choir, a musical style, that is not every day's business for an orchestra and a hand full of other loose parameters - the perfect premise for a demanding scoring session. However thanks to the great team in the Prague Smecky Studios, everything went smoothly, but let's start at the beginning...

After we arrived in Prague on January 29th 2006, we decided to first visit the Smecky Studio, that legendary studio that has been in use for recordings since the 1940s and where such film music stars as Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein recorded already. They were just in the middle of a session when we arrived there so we were able to get the first few impressions of the orchestra and meet our sound engineer Jan Holzner as well as James Fitzpatrick, who was responsible for the organisation.

The studio during a break. The percussion section in the background which was occupied by 6 musicians for some cues of the score for "Save Angel Hope" to create a nice groove.

So many toys to produce noise - the quality of the instruments was of course tested extensively by myself :-)

The next morning began early, the first session started already at 9:00 am. We had a quite full schedule for that one: 14 minutes of partially rhythmically quite demanding music with Latin American and jazz influences in only 4 hours of recording time. We arrived at the studio accordingly strained. The first takes were spent to record some logo fanfares which went extremeley well after a short rehearsing time, which gave us a basic confidence that at least most of the notes on the score sheets seem to be correct. After that we started recording the rhythmically demanding tracks which were filled with Latin American grooves and bigband like brass kicks. Two factors that can be quite a difficulty for an orchestra as it is not self-evident to expect precision in rhythm, timing and tempo by an orchestra in a way this music needed. Furthermore it's not usual to expect this precision by 85 musicians together. Surprisingly that challenge was coped after a short period of starting difficulties, especially thanks to our conductor Mario Klemens who lead the orchestra in an extremely competent way.

Conductor Mario Klemens has the orchestra under control and helps to sort out some minor problems with the groove by knocking it on his desk.

The director ready to choke the composer as soon as something sounds bad

Since the synchronsation to the movie was achieved by audio click all the time, it wasn't too difficult for the musicians to keep the groove and tempo. Our two jazz saxophone players and the jazz-experienced first trumpet player helped giving the sound colour a certain amount of authenticity, however they had a few more problems playing written-out notes to click than the sight-reading experienced orchestra musicians. The first actual problems appeared on a track that was basically just a suite out of several other score cues. However that was quite difficult as we first planned to not use any click on this one as it didn't have to be synced to the movie. So we left the musicians alone with such rhythmical traps as normal and double time at the same time, shifts from 4/4-groove to 7/8-groove, rhythmically difficult brass kicks and fully notated soli for saxophone and trumpet, hoping that it would work out just as well as before after a while of rehearsing. However we soon noticed that we had to use a click on this one, which helped quite a bit to keep the timing. We recorded several pick-ups on problematic parts to be able to cut them into the cue later.

Protools makes it possible - cutting together several takes without noticing. Sound engineer Jan Holzner at work. James Fitzpatrick in the background in red - the man with the organisation overview and the nearly infinite repertoire of British humour.

Everything still in sync?

After we finished the recordings of the Latin-American influenced tracks and were overall happy with the results, we continued with a few more "normal" score tracks, that were stylistically more every day's business of the orchestra and which were recorded with accordingly few problems - also thanks to the perfectly prepared parts of copyist Jiri Simunek. The communication with conductor and orchestra was done through an interpreter who had so incredibly lots of knowledge of music that we sometimes looked at her and asked whether she liked that take or not.

intense search for the best take - from the left to the right: Thorsten Engel (Scoring Assistant), Stanja Vomackova (Interpreter), Robin Hoffmann (Composer), Marco Lutz(Accounting), Lukas Erni (Director)

After we finished the first session with one cue delay (one wouldn't believe how fast 4 hours can fly by) we were happy that most worked out fine and were looking forward to the next session confidently. During our 1 hour lunch break we spent 50 minutes waiting for our food and 10 minutes eating it as fast as possible (still shaking fist at that restaurant, how can goulash take 50 minutes?) We proceeded recording, this time with a slightly reduced orchestration (saxophones, 1 percussionist and the English Horn weren't needed anymore for the following takes).

The orchestra - even first violinists have to use a mobile sometimes. The "German" seating order of the violins was used to achieve a nicer stereo effect.

The second session worked out just as fine as the ending of the first one, we only had to record pick-ups on few cues (and ask the trumpets to restrain a bit ;-) We also recorded a track that was synced to movie just by feeding the solo singing voiced that had to be put on top of the orchestra to the conductor who guided the orchestra through that extremely free timing (which made a Click impossible). That worked out perfectly thanks to the conductor who needed only one rehearsal to get the timing right. We even compensated our delay from the first session and had enough time to record 3 more "if we have time" tracks. Towards the end of the sessions the orchestra decreased to only 45 string players in the last cue who were doing a string overdub for a pop track.

Dangerous beasts - cut myself 3 times while flipping the pages of the score sheets, the puddle of blood has been retouched :-)

We left the studio with a confident feeling around 6 pm looking forward to the next day with the choir session. We arrived at 9 am the next morning back at the studio to listen to the ladies while rehearsing. We only had to record 4 cues in a 3 hour session so we had enough time to spend recording 15 takes on 2 bars, which had some difficulties because of several minor second intervals. The choir singers obviously had lots of fun recording the next cue which required deliberately wrong singing as well as the fact that we could let them go 45 minutes early as we had recorded everything already.

Finally we were really happy about the results of these session and went home with a satisfied feeling. Another thanks to the great musicians, Mario Klemens, Thorsten Engel, James Fitzpatrick, Jan Holzner, Lukas Erni and Gerrit Meyer (phobyxonic) who helped making this session so successfull.

Because it's cool another picture of the orchestra. orchestration: Woodwinds: 3/3/3/ts/as/3, Brass: 4/3/3/1, 6 Perc, Harp, Piano/Celeste, Strings: 14/12/10/8/6