Recording Children

I am in the process of recording an album sung by dozen or more of my neighbor’s kids. These are elementary school aged kids with many of them in 1st grade (The same age as my daughter). Last year we did an album of Christmas songs but this year it will be pop tunes.

There are a couple of challenges that you may run across when you record small children.

The first is shyness. My daughter is often the key to solving the shyness problem. She views the recording sessions as a play date and treats the session like it is time to play. This can be a challenge with more than one other child because of the amount of disruption and noise it creates. I treat the recording session as a short diversion from the play date and this usually is enough to let them enjoy the experience.

The very young have little sense of pitch. Four things set the groundwork of all sessions that I record with young children. 1) The songs are familiar to them 2) I pre-record the tracks to sound similar to the version they know 3) I have a distinctive instrument to play the melody line 4) I have a pre recorded vocal track to guide them.

After the ground work has been set, you should expect to do a fair amount of slicing to fix timing issues and you are likely to need to do more pitch correction that simply running a plug-in. But it is equally important not to change the character of the voice. It is possible to over process a track until you lose the personality of a child’s voice.

· Can’t remember the lyrics. The more familiar the song is to them the better but the recording process can make small children forget. Depending on the patience of the child, I can record phrase by phrase where I can call out a phrase and record it, stop and call out the next phrase. Or more often, I simply record the song 6 or more times catching what words I can. Then I splice the words together to create a whole performance.

· Dynamics. Kids sing loud and soft and are random about it. I compress the tracks going in and coming out to minimize the dramatic volume changes as much as possible. At the end of the recording I have the children sing words they missed or had trouble performing. Then cut and paste, cut and paste.

La Valse de la Prison / Tit Galop Pour Mamou

Here are a couple of fun Cajun tunes. Please forgive my french.


La Valse de la Prison

Waltz //: D / G / G / G / D / D / D7 / D7 / D7 / D7 / G / G ://

Dan la prison, cherie, Assis sur mon lit
Comment donc Jvais fair cherie Sans ma petite fille

Sans ma petite fille, cherie, Avec les yeux bleus
Comment donc j'vais fair cherie Si tu n'm'aim' plus

S' tu n'm'aim' plus, cherie, Jvais m'en aller
J vais m'en aller, cherie, Dans l'paradis



Tit Galop Pour Mamou

//: A / A //: A D/ D E- :// A / A //

Tit galop tit galop pour mamou
J'ai vendu mon p'tit mulet pour 15 sous
J'ai ach te des souliers neufs pour les p'tits
Et du sucr et du cafe pour les vieux

Tit galop, tit galop pour mamou
Jai vendu mon p'tit wagon pour 15 sous
J'ai ach te du candy roug pour les p'tits
Et un metre de ruban pour la vieill'