The Consort's recording tonight for the first time in months. I don't know about anyone else in the group, but I'm jazzed about it. I've been poring over Sound on Sound Magazine's archive of articles on technique, so I feel a lot more confident about how to get the best possible sound out of us (and then how to produce it once it's on disk). I've been using my AudioEdits to explore various production techniques (compression, eq, gates, reverbs and so on).

All this time I've been carrying around the impression that we still sound like our first CD (which, crappy recording equipment aside, suffered from some major performance flaws), so hearing the recordings of one of our gigs and our radio show has really made me feel a lot better about the music we make.

Don't get me wrong, the first CD isn't a total turd. Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno is one of the most beautiful madrigals I've come across, and I think we did a great job on it; it still gives me chills when I listen to it. Unfortunately, our sound engineer wasn't watching the meters, so there was some clipping during the loudest parts. Actually, our dynamic range on that was a little too wide; it goes from ultra-quiet sotto voce to speaker-shaking fortissimo. I can take care of that with compression, but can't do too much about the clipping distortion. Pity. I'd float the idea of asking our friend Sue to sing soprano on it so we can re-record it (as well as Tenebræ factæ sunt, which in my book comes second only to Allegri's Miserere for most beautiful motet), but I know some of the other guys in the Consort hate both songs.

Which reminds me, we need to work with her so we can record the madrigal which Sev and I wrote.