Vocal Music Salon

 by Megan Lomax

As the cherry on top of the end of a great year of Vocal Music Club at the Bronx Academy of Letters, our final unit revolved around recorded music, and music production. To help with the unit’s capstone project, our program coordinator Luis came in to do a recording session with my vocal students. All year (and all of our lives) we had been listening to various singers through recordings, but my students really didn’t understand all of the work that went into producing a song.

It was so rewarding to watch my students’ different reactions to hearing their voices recorded. They were so proud of the work that they had put in, and so proud of the new “power” they had to showcase their voices, not only live, but through recorded mediums.

Then, they got the opportunity to work with Brett, another BAE teaching artist and recording engineer, to learn about the different ways you can produce a song after it has been recorded. They taught us about sound engineering, mixing, digital audio workstations, splicing music and multiple takes together to get a finished product. We were shocked to learn that one of Billie Eilish’s songs uses over 60 takes!

This project was made possible by a grant from the Les Paul Foundation, who is mainly known as being a jazz guitarist, but also was an incredible innovator in how music gets recorded. Our students were employing some of the same techniques they he invented - albeit on much more modern equipment!

For me as a teacher, having the opportunity to overdub, record tracks separately and dub them on top of each other, and add in effects in “post” allows me to give the gift of recorded music to students who might otherwise not feel ready to perform an entire song live. The comfort of the recording studio, and the supportive tools that the audio engineer provides, really allows singing to be accessible to all - which is my ultimate goal.

Who knows - we may have just fostered a passion for engineering in the next great sound recording innovator!