Day 5

I changed my original plan to re-arrange the song in an acoustic style, and instead opted to use the original instrumental but still record the song as a somewhat live duet.

I gave Serena, who was already familiar with the song, the lyrics with her parts highlighted in pink and mine in blue, so she would get a feel for the arrangement.

I set up two condenser microphones to record at the same time, so that we could have a microphone each and record our lead vocals live together, to retain the spontaneity of a live performance and to keep the duet from sounded contrived or forced.

Setting up the microphones to record at the same time in Logic Pro was particularly challenging and took at least an hour to figure out - significantly more time than expected. I had to go into the Mac's Audio MIDI Setup and from there create a new aggregate device which I named "TEST". I then was able to select both the Tapco USB Interface (which Serena's microphone was plugged into) and my AT2020 USB microphone as inputs.

Here is a picture of the setup (offline, after recording):

I then went back into Logic Pro where my USB microphone was "Input 1" and set this as the input for the track I titled "Jonny LEAD" - lead being short for lead vocals. I then did the same for Serena's, whose microphone which was connected with the Tapco audio interface was "Input 4". So I then had three tracks, the first being the "Window Seat" instrumental, the second "Jonny LEAD" and the third "Serena LEAD".

Me and Serena then proceeded to record the track at the same time, reading the lyrics (as highlighted with each of our parts in an earlier post) so that we would sing the right parts. We sang through around 1/4 of the song in the first take as we hadn't rehearsed the song as a duet much, so despite reading our parts as we sang, we still missed parts or sang over each other unintentionally.

From then on, we would record one part at a time, together at the same time of course so that we would be multi-track recording, for example recording the intro and first verse in one take, then doing then chorus, then second verse etc...until all the lead vocals were complete.

Serena then had to leave, so I created four more tracks to record backing vocals on, labelling them "Jonny BACK", "Jonny BACK 2", "Jonny BACK 3" and "Jonny BACK 4". The reason for creating four was that I would have at least 2 recordings of each part or harmony, so I could pan one backing vocal to the left and another to the right, leaving the lead vocals in the middle. This can be heard on the chorus and bridge sections ("come back, come back baby, come back")

Once the backing vocals were complete, I created another track on which I recorded some ad-libs which "echo" some of the lead vocals towards the end of the track.

Here is a picture of all the recorded vocal tracks: