Recording Session - Tibetan Film

This recording session really came out of the blue. I got a call from Marc about recording a song for a movie with a Tibetan singer. It was an urgent situation where they needed it done in a couple of days (as I've found is often the case in China).

I didn't really have much on besides needing to learn a bunch of songs for the JZ festival this weekend, so I agreed and we were on it straight away.

Marc and Yangjima came over a couple of hours later to go through the song. Actually the reason I got the call is cause she requested a double bass.

It turns out she had just written this song the day before. She usually does tradition Tibetan music, but this one for the film she had a bolero or a rumba in mind.

So we worked through the song. She had quite a vivid idea about exacly what she wanted. This part needs to be more intense, 2 hits here, break there etc.

The next day we were up early fighting through Shanghai's peak hour traffic to the studio. Quite a nice one! Manels (sound engineer) normally uses it for composing and creating background music for films. But today this was his project.

At first I thought we would all record together, to get more of a live feel. Yangjima decided to record seperately to edit more easily, and do more work on the production side.

It ended up taking the whole day. Guitar, then a bunch of percussion (cajon, cymbals, tamborine, bongos etc) all recorded seperately. I did my part around 4:30-5pm. Seemed like he got a couple of decent takes (I hope!). Then Yanjima did a few vocal takes before our time was up.

We were listening back to the song, and even though it hadn't been mixed yet it was sounding pretty nice!

The film is being either filed or directed by a monk from Bhutan by the name of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, and is being filmed in Nepal (as I understood). When the movie comes out I'll post and link it back to the recording session.

This is a bit of a vid mix of the day.

https://dlive.io/video/owain82220/a19371f4-bc16-11e8-96f4-0242ac110003

Yangjima - vocals
Pascal - percussion
Marc - guitar
Manels - sound
myself - bass