Behind the Scenes: The Miller’s Dance

I wanted to record something exciting and flamenco-inspired, and The Miller’s Dance from The Three Cornered Hat by Manuel de Falla had exactly what I wanted. If you are unfamiliar with the piece, you will find it surprising to learn that it was not written for the guitar, it was written for orchestra! But Falla helped to define the Spanish sound by incorporating folk music, and especially the flamenco guitar music that was so familiar to him, into his compositions. I took a lot of liberties with my arrangement, including the addition of a short cadenza (that is, improvisation) to the introduction.

I recorded it in my loft using my 2004 Stephen Hill SP/CY flamenco guitar, and two AKG C451B microphones mounted on a 9” stereo bar above the guitar at about 26 inches away, which is the setup I’ve been using a lot recently. Remarkably, there is no reverb added to the track, and all of the room sound you hear is the natural acoustic of the loft. There’s a section of the piece where I play with a tambora technique of tapping the strings with my thumb rather than strumming or picking the strings. The microphones picked-up more of the “thump” than the voices of the strings as compared to what I heard live while I was playing, so I had to do some equalization in that section. But otherwise there is no equalization except a small dip (-2 dB with Q of 2) at 300 Hz and 5.5 kHz to reduce sound hole mud and finger noise, respectively.

Marilyn and I were super excited to try out our new lights that you can see in the photo! We bought a Neewer 130 Watt RGB light, with a big softbox to diffuse the light, and we bought an RGB LED panel as well. We setup the Neewer as the key light, and used the LED panel as a fill light, being careful not to cause a reflection from the glass over our print of the Jaleo painting by Singer Sargent that you see in the background. We used two iPhone cameras on mic stands for A-roll and B-roll footage from two different angles. Then we did another take with one camera overhead, and another take with Marilyn shooting with the hand-held stabilizer. Needless to say the project was a lot of fun! We still have some things to learn about lighting, but hopefully we are making improvements with each new video.

Thanks for reading!