The luxury of digital recording

Following on from what I wrote the other day about a song I wrote in Hebrew for the kibbutz song festival: I rewrote a few lines and in doing so, I removed the infelicities from the words and from one line where the words didn't really fit the tune (too many syllables). 

I then had to rerecord the vocals; at first I thought that I could keep the final verse, but it turned out that there had been changes in every verse and so I had to sing the whole thing though again (it's only a short song but a bit too fast for me to sing comfortably). Fortunately I had fewer problems this time and was able to mix a revised version of the song reasonably quickly.

Whilst walking the dog, I had been thinking of including a modulation, although I wasn't too sure of its position within the song. As I wrote yesterday, the verse finishes with the deceptive cadence Ab -> G, which also returns the song to the key of C, after a mild flirtation in Eb. All I had to do was add a bar between the end of the third verse and the beginning of the final choruses; the instruments play an A chord in this bar. This required me to transpose all the notes in the final choruses by a whole note (for now the song is in D and not C), a task which I accomplished in a matter of seconds.

I then imported the new MIDI file into Reason and exported a new wave file. With regard to the vocals, I calculated how much time the extra bar would require then inserted silence lasting for this interval (just under two seconds) into the vocal track. Using pitch correction software, I then transposed the vocals of the final choruses again by a whole note, imported the edited track into the multi-track recording program then mixed the whole thing again.

Total time required: less than five minutes. This is the luxury of working with digital recording tools. If I were working in an analog situation, I would have to get the musicians back to the studio in order to record the final section again in the new key. The singer would also have to sing the choruses in the new key (I could splice in some new tape for the silence). Total time required: at least an hour, once the people were in the studio. It might well take longer to bring them together, although if we were in the middle of recording an album, the musicians and singer would presumably be present all the time.

My wife thinks that the song is 'charming' although she doesn't want to sing it live.