Virtual Orchestra: Preparation and Recording

During the pandemic, I ran the Googler Virtual Orchestra project. This consisted of syncing recording and syncing dozens of musicians to create a seamless performance.

Here is how Finlandia was done from an audio perspective.

Prep #

Everything begins with obtaining a copy of the score. With the score we can derive the instrumentation for the piece and start getting an idea of what will be needed. As a key tenant of the Googler Virtual Orchestra was musician inclusion, we found ourselves in need of adding additional parts. This meant adding saxophones and other instruments to a traditionally classical score.

Once all of the parts were finalized with our music director, we could move onto ref track production while the process of recruiting musicians began in parallel.

Ref Track Production #

When playing in an orchestra, there are really many tempos. Each musician internalizes a tempo and then essentially tries to keep their tempo close to those around them, including that of the conductor. The conductor can try to suggest tempos to the orchestra, but it is ultimately up to the musicians.

In the virtual orchestra environment where everybody is playing solo at home, a musician can no longer seek a mutually agreed upon tempo with their fellow musicians as there are no other musicians involved. Instead a strict tempo needs to be prescribed for all musicians to orient themselves to. This is where the reference track comes in.

The reference track is a version of the piece with a loud click, markers for locating oneself in the music, and reference music for the musicians to perform to. To construct the ref track for Finlandia, every note had to be entered into Logic Pro X by hand, including all articulations and dynamics. The entire process involved close collaboration between myself and the music director to ensure that the track conveys the correct general feelings to the musicians and has more natural tempos.

One challenge with the reference track approach is that there is no visual for musicians. Not only do musicians communicate via sound, but they also communicate with each other via body language. The conductor can inject a lot of emotion into a performance with their movements. However, these movements are not as precise as a click and thus leave room for divergence in the tempo. This can be worsened by playback systems where the video and audio is tens of milliseconds out of sync, which is surprisingly common. Thus the decision, much to the dismay of musicians, was to keep the reference to purely an audio file to ensure that there was only one source of truth.

Once completed, the reference track for Finlandia was provided to musicians as both an MP3 and a WAV for them to practice to and to record to.

All generations of the Finlandia reference track throughout its preparation are available for listening.

Recording #

Once the reference track is released to the orchestra, musicians were given about a month to practice to it. We set up virtual sectionals where section leads could communicate guidance and answer questions. Chat groups quickly developed among the sections to answer questions and to provide social opportunities in the WFH period.

After the month period ended, musicians were instructed to record themselves performing the piece while listening to the ref track. They could use any device to record themselves ranging from cell phones to professional audio and video recording equipment. Musicians were able to provide multiple takes and could even split the piece into separate segments, which was necessary given its length.

The recording process was by far the hardest portion for musicians. When performing in an ensemble, it’s easy to accept mistakes as a consequence of a live performance. In a recording environment, however, musicians tend to become more critical of themselves and often found themselves performing many takes, trying to get the perfect take. We reminded musicians that submitting multiple takes was acceptable, but our ultimate goal was to produce a performance that sounded more live rather than studio-made.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how the mix and edit was done with the hundreds of recordings received from musicians.