Gregory Slobodian

During May of 2026, I was invited to record Slava and Svetlana in their recital at 'Music in the heart of Blackburn', a series of performances running from 2025 to 2026 in the museum's Victorian gallery, featuring musicians based in the UK.

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I have known Slava and Svetlana from my days in college as a music student back in 2013 and I now that I work at the same college Slava had been eager to work on something with me after we reconnected. The classical stylings of this duet were certainly a nice change of pace after all the work I've done recording classic rock and pop covers.

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The recording went well - I Enjoyed working in the gallery, the room had a nice warm sound to it and a little bit of a reverb that you should be able to hear in the recordings below. I certainly didn't enjoy lugging all my gear around (I'm going to have to invest in a bag with wheels at some point). I ended up setting up 3 mics on piano - Left, Right and one placed underneath to capture some of the lower end and the resonance. 2 mics were used on the cello - a gooseneck pointed at the f holes and a pencil condenser pointed at the neck - the gooseneck did a lot of the heavy lifting whilst the pencil was mainly there for some softer tones as it was placed a about a foot away from the instrument. Finally a room mic was placed behind the performers - ideally I would have loved to have placed this at the back of the room to capture all the reverb and warmth of the venue, but I didn't have enough cable to do so (also I wouldn't trust the audience to be that close to my gear). 

 

Mixing was a lengthy process - not necessarily because the content was challenging to mix, but because of the amount of content I had to work through - in total I had 17 tracks to work on: 6 recordings we did before the recital that totalled 13m:59s and 11 recordings from the recital that totalled 47m:31s. All in all that was 1h:1m:30s of music that I worked through - and that's not counting the recordings that were scrapped and all the parts of the recital that wasn't music. Although getting the right sound wasn't too difficult (and something I could apply to the whole project more or less) I still had to do the whole 1h:1m:30s of volume automation so each track would be a smooth listening experience.

One interesting technique I ended up developing for this project was the use of parallel processing for the piano track - the mics didn't end up picking up as much top end as I would have liked and just EQing it back in didn't do it justice, so I copied the L and R tracks of the piano and on the copied track applied EQ and multiband compression to really bring out the top end and then blended that in with the other piano track giving me a more rounded sound.

 

Mastering wasn't too difficult either, just more volume automation and some de-noise automation too to catch where the audience had interrupted my recording (you'd think they'd know better than to cough).

 

All in all I enjoyed the experience of recording some classical tracks and working in a different venue than what I'm used to and I wouldn't mind having the opportunity again to further my skills.  

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Below I have included a demo reel of both the recital and the recordings we did - each 4 minute track goes through a few choice snippets of the music we recorded so I hope you enjoy having a listen.​​​​​