This past month, I’ve been working on recording rehearsal and performance tracks for Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along at Miami Palmetto Senior High School (in Florida!) I’ve recorded rehearsal tracks for my own productions before, and often do one-off recordings for singers to practice with before auditions or performances, but this is was the first time I had done a full recording of a show I wasn’t music directing myself.

Their music director asked for piano, trumpet, and drums for the performance tracks. I recorded the piano/conductor score in Logic using Pianoteq’s Steinway Model B for the rehearsal tracks. We were then able to adjust those files for tempos and vamps after they had been solidified in rehearsal. I then recorded the trumpet “live” from my Yamaha MOXF8- I would have recorded via MIDI in Logic for this, as well, but needed more flexibility than the stock Logic trumpet sounds could offer, both due to the lack of mute options, and also because the samples were shorter than I needed.

I enlisted the help of Alek Mann, with whom I play often in musical pits and in Whiskey Shadows, to record the percussion book. We recorded at Thundercore Deluxe in downtown Champaign, Illinois, with Keith Norton (also of Whiskey Shadows) serving as engineer. We knocked out all the kit parts first, and then went back and recorded any auxiliary percussion bits we had skipped over.

Below are a few sample tracks and some pictures from the drum tracking session. If you’re in the Miami area, the show runs November 5 & 6 at Miami Palmetto Senior High School.

*Please note that due to licensing restrictions and the custom nature of this work, I am not able to rent out tracks I’ve made for previous productions. If you’re interested in commissioning rehearsal or performance tracks of your own, feel free to reach out via my contact form or by email.