Recording Three Bihu Geet with Two Microphones
A school audio club has a Rs 25,000 grant to record three Bihu geet for a community CD. The recording room is a classroom with a ceiling fan, tile floor and no acoustic treatment. The club has two dynamic microphones, one two-input USB interface, a laptop, one pair of headphones, a dhol, a pepa, a gogona, a taal and a harmonium. The student singer wants all instruments recorded at once 'for live energy'. The volunteer engineer wants to replace the pepa and gogona with software synth patches because they are hard to mic. The Bihu teacher insists both instruments are essential. The deadline is 10 days, and the CD will be sold at a school function. Six performers are available for only three evening sessions.
1. Advise on a recording plan that fits the equipment, room and deadline while preserving Bihu timbre. Justify your choices.
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Do not record all at once. With two inputs in an untreated room, a loud dhol will bleed into every microphone and bury the pepa and gogona. Overdubbing is the only reliable approach in the time available.
Suggested plan:
- Session 1: record dhol and taal together as the rhythmic bed, with the singer marking a guide vocal. Use one microphone close on the dhol skin and one on the taal, or record dhol first and overdub taal if bleed is severe.
- Session 2: overdub harmonium and guide vocal; then pepa and gogona separately. Close-mic the pepa at the bell and the gogona near the mouth but off-axis.
- Session 3: lead vocal, then group response or backing.
Control the room: switch off the fan, hang blankets or curtains, record at night when the school is quiet, and use headphones for overdubs. Keep the natural room sound but avoid flutter. The synth may double a part quietly if a phrase is unplayable, but it must not replace the live instruments. Mix with the voice forward, dhol centred, and pepa and gogona clearly audible. Three songs in three evenings is tight but feasible if each session has a written running order.
2. The volunteer argues that 'audiences only care about the song, not the instruments.' How do you respond with reference to Bihu music aesthetics and the purpose of the CD?
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Audiences may not name the pepa, but they recognise its reedy, nasal call and the gogona's buzzing jaw-harp pulse as part of the Bihu soundworld. Those timbres are not decoration; they signal that the track belongs to a particular ensemble tradition. Replacing them with generic synth patches produces folk-pop with Bihu lyrics, not a Bihu geet recording.
The purpose of this CD is community documentation as well as performance. Students and future classes should be able to hear what a pepa and a gogona actually sound like in an ensemble, and the student players deserve credit for their work. A reasonable compromise is to keep the live instruments as primary, use a synth pad only for sustain or low support, and list every instrument in the liner notes. If a pepa take is poor, re-record it rather than replacing it. The volunteer is right that casual listeners may not analyse the instrumentation; that is precisely why the production team has to.
3. What credit, consent and documentation steps should be completed before the CD is sold?
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Before sale, the club should secure:
- written consent from every performer and from parents or guardians of minors;
- songwriter and lyricist credits for each track, including whether a song is traditional and which village or family version was used;
- a check that no film tune or copyrighted lyric has been reused;
- permission from the Bihu teacher and instrument players for their names and performances to appear;
- liner notes listing performers, instruments, recording dates and the school as producer;
- an archive master kept separately from the sale copies, with a simple metadata sheet.
If a traditional song is used, the notes should say 'traditional, as sung by [source]' rather than presenting it as newly composed. If any text or melody is new, the student composer should be credited. The club should also decide in advance where the sale proceeds go, so that the project is transparent. These steps protect the school and model good practice for students.