CASE STUDY: location recording
Recording new choral works for Oxford University Press
St Barnabas Church, Ealing, London
July 2024
The Project
We produced a set of recordings of eleven new choral works with a professional choir of eighteen singers, with piano and percussion on some of the tracks. The recordings took place in a church in west London on a single day in July 2024 with the post-production completed, and audio masters delivered to the client within a month, to allow for a September release. The recordings were released online to promote the client’s latest published works, and to assist choral directors and singers in choosing repertoire for upcoming performances.
The Client
Oxford University Press has been a leading publisher of sheet music for over one hundred years. Particularly renowned in the realm of choral music, they publish many well known composers including David Bednall, Bob Chilcott, Gabriel Jackson, Cecilia McDowall, Sarah Quartel, John Rutter, Will Todd, and Mack Wilberg among many others. BMP have been a supplier of recording services to the company for nearly fourteen years, producing a range of instrumental and choral recordings supporting music and educational publications.
The Performers
The choir was made up of members of the professional, UK-based recording and performing choir, London Voices. The group is managed and directed by Ben Parry, conductor, composer and former Artistic Director of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. London Voices have performed throughout Europe, Asia and the USA, and can range from a small vocal consort through to a choir of more than 100 singers. The choir has tackled a vast array of repertoire ranging from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary music and are well-known for singing on hundreds of movie and computer game soundtracks, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings film series.

The pianist was Richard Gowers; Conductor Designate of the London Handel Orchestra and Choir of the 21st Century, and Director of Music at St George's Hanover Square, Handel’s church in London.
One of the pieces to be recorded had a part for Djembe drum and was performed by percussionist and composer, Sam Wilson; principal player with the Riot Ensemble and London Contemporary Orchestra.
The Challenge
Produce clear, high quality, accurate recordings with an inspiring sound.
With forty minutes of music to be recorded across only 2 x 3 hour sessions, work quickly and efficiently, minimising the session time taken out for sound balancing at the start of the day.
When switching between the unaccompanied pieces, the works with piano and the occasional addition of percussion instruments, keep changeover and rebalancing time to a minimum to maximise recording time.
Although working in a church acoustic, ensure that the microphone system and placement allows for flexibility in the mix to allow for creation of balances suitable for both sacred and secular works.
Ensure that sufficient takes are recorded for each piece to cover the work properly and allow the creation of an excellent edited master in post-production.
Turn the whole project around from recording sessions to production master within 4 weeks to meet the client publication deadline.
The Planning
We had not recorded in the proposed venue prior to this recording. It's possible to gather much information about a recording location through websites, online photographs, maps and street views. We will always do this in the first instance, however, nothing is a substitute for a site visit. We made arrangements with the church to visit 6 weeks in advance of the recording, to check the following
Travel times to and from base.
Best access point to the building for a vehicle and for carrying in recording equipment.
Parking arrangements once the equipment is loaded in.
The acoustics of the performance space.
Location of a reasonably acoustically isolated room within the building to use as a temporary sound control room and establish the best route for running cables from there to the performance space.
The location of electrical mains sockets within the control room and performance spaces.
The in-house piano if that is to be used in the recording.
Any potential sources of unwanted noise both within and outside of the building.
Other facilities - kitchen, W.C, nearby cafes, take away food outlets and so on
We will always take lots of wide and close up photographs and video footage inside and out for referring to later when planning the recording set up

In the run up to the recording we maintained regular contact with the client to be informed about any changes in personnel for the sessions, changes in the repertoire and, as these were new works and new publications, any last minute changes to the music scores which we had been sent in advance.
We emailed the Choir Director and instrumentalists to introduce ourselves and discuss some specific session details.
Although in many cases we will draw up a recording schedule in advance of the sessions and circulate it to all personnel, in this case the client undertook that task. The schedule will contain details of the recording venue, session times, the repertoire to be recorded, the performing and production personnel involved and contact details.
We checked with the client and venue that the piano would be tuned just prior to the recording sessions. This commonly happens early in the morning of each day of recording, however, for this recording it
was carried out the evening before, which was fine, especially for an in-house rather than hired instrument which is already acclimatised to its surroundings.
The evening before the OUP recording sessions, following the completion of a separate recording project in central London, we travelled to a hotel within 5 minutes drive of the venue. Although the first recording session of the day wasn’t due to start until 10.30am, our work begins 3 or 4 hours before that start time. Being close as possible to the venue for an early get-in and avoiding the risk of being held up in rush hour traffic is the ideal.
The Rig
We arrived at the venue at 0730 and unloaded the recording equipment into the venue; some equipment (microphones, stands etc) going to the performance space, and some (recording devices, speakers etc) to the separate room chosen to be our control room. Depending on the scale of a recording, loading in, setting the mics, running cables and setting up the control room can take between two and four hours. It’s wise to allow time for any trouble-shooting, and also for a short breather and quick coffee before the recording session starts.
We set up ten microphones for the recording:
1+2, a stereo main pair on a single stand, essentially providing the sound of the choir
3+4, two 'spot mics' placed closer to the choir, used to add focus to the choir sound or give a closer, less reverberant sound.
5+6, a piano pair to provide the main stereo sound for the piano in the accompanied pieces
7+8, percussion pair for the piece with Djembe drum and other pieces with hand percussion and clapping
9+10, a more distant ‘ambience’ pair of microphones which allow for mixing in the reverberant sound of the church acoustic to taste, depending on the repertoire.

The Recording Sessions
With the choir all assembled by 1030 a sound balance was achieved quickly and recording got underway. We began the day with unaccompanied pieces for upper voices and as the day progressed, added in piano, then percussion, and in the afternoon, lower voices.
A recording day usually has two, three-hour recording sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each three-hour session is divided in two with a twenty minute refreshment break in the middle. There’s commonly an hour long lunch break between the two sessions. This makes for four intense eighty minute spells of recording in the day, which works well.
The sessions ended at 1730 at which point we immediately set to dismantling and putting away all of the recording equipment, pulling away in the van from the venue around 1900, eleven and a half hours from our arrival.
Outcome
The day went very smoothly and in fact there was enough time left over within the sessions to record four very short additional pieces related to another OUP publication.
The Response
In an message soon after the recording sessions the Head of Publishing at OUP wrote to us:
“It was a wonderful session – thank you all! I’m very much looking forward to hearing the edits and sharing final tracks with the composers.”
In an email following delivery of the production masters the Product Editor wrote:
“Thank you so much, Ken! We’re really delighted with the tracks.”
Choral recording production. How can we help you?
If you’d like to talk to us about a choral recording and how we can deliver excellent results for you, complete the short contact form at the bottom of our homepage at www.bmp-recording.co.uk or email us at info@bmp-recording.co.uk
You might also like to look at the section of our website dedicated to choral recording, here:
If you’d like to listen to the final recordings from the sessions follow either of the following links:
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