Recording set-up in the church
Listening to a fresh take
Using lights in the dark to minimize background buzz from ceiling lights
Harp solo!
Tuning in the darkness, view from the equipment
Tuning in the darkness
Finishing recording on a cold January day (with snow!)
Noise reduction 101
A few days ago, we finished the first of our two recording sessions.
We spent three days, January 14-16, recording in the sanctuary of Christ Presbyterian Church in New Haven, CT. It’s intense work, to be sure, but so gratifying. We are thrilled to be working with Mateusz Zechowski of Studio Teo, who provides keen musical insight in addition to his recording engineering expertise. During these January sessions, we recorded Russell Nadel’s Orchard Sunset, Michael Weinstein-Reiman’s Roland, Aaron Price’s Amber Veil, Naftali Schindler’s Chants, Pastorals, and Antiphons of the New Moon, and our transcription of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne Nos. 2 and 4. In all, we laid down about 2/3 of the music for the album.
When we weren’t recording, photographer Courtney Potter was snapping pictures of us in various spots around New Haven, including Union Station and the elegant New Haven Lawn Club. Thanks to her stellar work, we have beautiful photography for our album packaging, plus many more photos. We’re giving sneak peaks of the photos on our Facebook page, so be sure to like Apple Orange Pair to see them all! Here’s a really cool one:
We are back from an extended December break, during which we played a collective bunch of Nutcrackers, orchestra concerts, and church jobs in Virginia and New England. Whew! In between, Colleen got to experience the travails of transportation problems, and is now equipped with a shiny red new station wagon for continued road fun with the harp.
We’re hitting the recording studio starting January 14, and are excited to be working with renowned sound engineer and oboist Mateusz Zechowski in New Haven. We are even more excited to (probably) be recording in our old performance venue, Christ Presbyterian Church, at which we have so many fans and friends. Our experiences at this church, musically and otherwise, have been increasingly meaningful to us both over the course of 8+ years (even before we started playing together!). We are glad to be able to acknowledge the wonderful people there, and the church’s lovely sanctuary, by using it for our first recording.
During our time together in January, we will be recording at least 2/3 of our CD (the remainder to be done in February when Colleen is back for Eastern CT Symphony); meeting with graphic designers; and having amazing photo shoots with the talented Courtney Potter Cook, a photographer from North Carolina. We are looking forward to her creative assistance in fashioning a unique image for our CD, poster, and other recording-related items!
Today we start our 30-day Kickstarter campaign to make our first recording!
We encourage you to visit our Kickstarter page, where you can also watch our project video for a personal message from us. You can read a longer project description there too, or read this post for the condensed version.
We hope this project excites you as much as it does us! You can back us online through our Kickstarter page, which is only live until December 1.
Click on our project picture to view our Kickstarter page & video!
Our recording will feature new pieces we have commissioned and performed the past two years by composers Russell Nadel, Michael Weinstein-Reiman, Naftali Schindler, and Beth May. We are also recording a handful of our personal arrangements of classical favorites. All together, we are recording about 60 minutes of music. We hit the recording studio starting in January 2013, with a release date in late June.
The pieces on our recording are all brand-new pieces that have not been professionally recorded or released before. Each of them highlights the harp and the horn, individually and together, in ways that no other pieces we have yet performed do. We have already performed most of these pieces in Connecticut and Maine earlier this year for live audiences who, like us, are excited about this new music! We are eager to make this music available to wider audiences and performers soon through our recording.
Don’t just take our word for how great this music is though! We’d love it if you “listened ahead” to samples of these pieces, which you can find streaming online on our music page. (We will be adding more clips throughout our 30-day project, so check back often!)
We are specially asking for YOUR help in bringing our project to fruition! From the recording sessions to its design, packaging, and manufacture, our project requires at least $9000 for us to do it the right way.
If we meet our goal, you will be part of our project’s creation the whole way as a backer. We’ll send you regular email updates, sneak previews of tracks, our entire digital album, a signed CD, and you even have the opportunity to have us perform live at your own house! You will actually receive our recording before our album is publicly released. Finally, you’ll also have the satisfaction of knowing that you contributed to a valuable creative cause, supported the fine arts in these dire times, and championed the cause of new classical music for two unique instruments.
If you decide to “back” our project, please do it soon (and spread the word to your music-loving friends and family!). This is an all-or-nothing campaign: If we do not meet our goal of $9000 by December 1, we will not receive ANY funding at all. And the earlier in our campaign that you back us, the higher the odds that our project will succeed. (Even $10 goes a long way and will earn you our eternal gratitude and a free track!)
Thank you, as always, for your ongoing support of our musical endeavors. It is a privilege performing for you, working with you, and knowing you. We are excited to have you join us on our next harp-and-horn adventure!
Performing at the Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, ME. Photo courtesy of Abby Ang.
After a successful round of performances in the Atlantic Music Festival’s summer salon series, we returned to Connecticut in August to finish our demo recordings of our three 2012 commissions.
Less than a week later, Colleen and her husband moved to Bluefield, Virginia, in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.
Thus we begin our 2012-2013 season living 650 miles apart. The plan? Well, we are hard at work right now preparing our Kickstarter campaign to fund our first full-length recording. Our CD will feature some of our favorite commissions (five new pieces to date!) as well as a few pieces we have enjoyed performing together the past two years. We are looking forward to recording sessions starting in January 2013! We hope to release our album by May 2013.
In the meantime, we are busily booking concerts for May 2013, including venues in Virginia, DC, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Our Kickstarter campaign starts this Monday, October 22. Stay tuned for updates, or join our
email list for weekly updates as we prepare for our recording!