logo
--- ---

Lead Me, Lord

The first time I sang this in the original SATB arrangement with the choir of St Paul’s in Withington, Manchester, just a few weeks ago, I fell in love with it. I knew I had to record my own take on it.

Fortunately, [ChoralWiki had a MusicXML file available](https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Lead_me,_Lord_(Samuel_Sebastian_Wesley) that saved me from having to do manual MIDI entry for the organ part. I chose James Gibb’s edition for no particular reason.

When we sang this in choir, under David Caine, the solo was accompanied by piano; the tutti sections were a cappella. I decided here to keep the organ throughout.

This is my first attempt at trying to layer many takes of myself: a close-mic, medium-mic, and far-mic track for each of the SATB parts, each of the three sung separately to embrace the organic differences between takes: it is the slightly staggered consonants and breathing of even the most coordinated choirs that makes it sound like a choir, after all; and the difference in mic distance help vary the tone colour, strength of consonants, etc.

The solo part is recorded on 2 tracks: once with the small-diaphragm AKG P170, same as all the other vocals, and simultaneously with the large-diaphragm Audio Technica AT-2020 placed as a direct mic. The idea is that, in a real-life (classical) setting, a soloist’s sound would certainly be picked up by “ambient” mics, but would likely also be recorded with its own mic.

In total, then, 14 tracks plus the MIDI organ.

The tenor part had me most hesitant since, if all sung in the same register, its notes frequently go above the soprano part, thereby taking the melody in a rather different direction. I decided to try it anyway and, in mixing, simply lower the volume of the tenor part; I am quite pleased with the results and the organ does help in guiding the melody since it is almost entirely in unison with the voice parts.

Approximate mic distances:

Everything was set up and recorded in a 90 minute window on the evening of 2024-07-04 — shortly before choir rehearsal, funnily enough. Normally I save my voice on those days, but for some reason I felt compelled to do the whole project in that one session.

Indeed, that turned out to be a fortuitous decision: my voice sounds quite gravelly and delicate here as I wasn’t feeling great — early symptoms of flu, I suspected — 2 days later I had that familiar pain in the tonsils. A fitting text to sing just before a forced break?

I don’t think I did more than 3 takes of any one part and pretty much started without warmup. It is a short and simple piece so I would have been pretty disappointed in myself if I’d needed much more than that.

(Editing was minimal, as always: trimming the starts and ends of the takes, compressor, EQ, balancing the volumes…these all happened over the subsequent 2 days and really only took about an hour in the end.)