The music of ‘West Bancroft Side Story’

When working on a musical, one of the most important aspects to take into consideration is the music, which has to be edited into the film carefully.

When we first considered creating "West Bancroft Side Story" as a musical, there were several problems we could foresee, the first of which was the sound recording. While it was easy for the broadcasting group to access cameras for filming, recording sound – specifically high-quality vocals – was a different story.

Sound recording is important because the microphones used for a video camera, while high in quality, are different from the types of microphones used to record music.

To produce songs of the same quality used in shows like "Glee" or movies such as "Mamma Mia!" or "Hairspray," the production team would need a way to record professional-level vocal music.

That's when producer Carina Cornieles approached the student radio station to engineer the music recording process.

The production of this show has a two-part system: the project is filmed by UTTV while the music is recorded at WXUT's station.

It was not the first time that WBSS cast members walked into WXUT's studio, but the recording of this track marked the first non-ensemble song the cast has recorded and the first completed project.

Last Monday, the cast finished recording the title track, a song sung by leads Joey and Sonia – played by Nick Kneer and Megan Beckett – as they fall in love.

Recording only vocals is very different from filming. They are also somewhat similar: both take a very long time just to record a few minutes' worth of product.

For example, most pop songs are between three and five minutes long. The song we worked on was just under four minutes long – but it took nearly two hours to record!

The recording process started with sound checks. The sound engineer – one of the DJs at WXUT – used three microphones for this recording: one for each of the two vocalists and one for the guitar, which was played by Nick Kneer.

Recording took several takes. In the first three takes, the sound engineer asked the vocalists to sing along with the guitar as she worked on balancing the three microphones.

When a song is recorded, the actual song balance is different from the end product. The sound engineer must adjust the levels of each microphone to produce the best sound – whether it means reducing Megan Beckett's microphone to account for her powerful voice or raising the volume on the guitar. Changing the balance between the guitar and two vocalists changed the overall sound of the song.

After the sound engineer had found a good balance, she asked to do something slightly different with the next few takes to see if there was a change in quality: record the vocal tracks separately from the guitar tracks.

The performance of both the guitar and vocals improved when recorded separately. The guitar portion was recorded after two takes.

Recording the vocals in time with the guitar was another challenge. There were several vocal-only takes because of all the issues associated with the vocal part of the track.

For instance, the male vocal's voice cracking tends to be something that should be edited out.

Beyond issues in the actual singing, there were also issues with the female vocal track. As mentioned earlier, Megan Beckett's microphone had to be volume-reduced. She also had to change her distance from the microphone so as not to overload it.

Editing the tracks together was also an interesting problem. The vocal track was slightly behind the guitar track and had to be adjusted, which took several minutes.

The entire recording session, which we estimated would take an hour and a half, took almost two hours instead between balancing, the multiple takes, reviewing the music and editing.

This was all worthwhile, though: the cast has their first fully recorded song to show for their efforts.