New House Choir

I had just moved into a new house. The floors were still bare wood and we had not yet moved all of our furniture in. The ceilings vault from 9ft to 11ft in the three largest rooms. So there was a lot of bouncy natural reverb happening– the kind you normally don’t want in your recording room. But if you are listening to someone across the house, the verb mixing in has an interesting character.

So I grabbed an 8 foot ladder and a couple of microphones some basic USB Sudotack ones and set them both up high in the front room. Then I recorded my own voice from several positions from 3 rooms away. I wanted the mics to capture a lot of the bouncy verb that was happening. Then I moved the mics to a position somewhere in the middle of the house and recorded a few more singing positions. Then a 3rd mic position near the back of the house, and some more singing positions.

I’m not a perfect singer by any means, and my pitch definitely wavers a bit. I considered naming this instrument the Warts-And-All Choir. You might be able to hear my kids playing in the backyard on some of the notes. But, in addition to capturing the sound of the house, I wanted something that was imperfect that I could use when I need something that sounds flawed.

The recordings were mixed in Logic, and then tripled, altering the formant on the copied tracks with a vocal transformer. A small amount of Spaces reverb was added to smooth out some of the releases. There are 2 velocity layers with the lower velocities playing only part of the choir and the upper velocities playing the full choir.

Here is a demo using the New House Choir: https://soundcloud.com/user-362029491/new-house-choir?si=b0aabc766c1c4a36b8bfcfb264dbb203