The university’s two acappella groups, Tonal Eclipse and The Ahhx Chords, soon will have professionally recorded music on Spotify.
The two songs the groups recorded are expected to release by the beginning of April. Each piece was recorded by one of the two groups, and those two songs will constitute the entire joint EP.
Josh Kelley, vocal performance junior, music director of Tonal Eclipse and member of The Ahhx Chords, said the songs are already recorded. He said they hired Voices Only, a recording company in Michigan, and recently flew a sound engineer to Oklahoma City to record during a weekend.
“We basically spent about eight hours in a recording room on Saturday for Tonal Eclipse, and about eight hours on Sunday for Ahhx Chords,” Kelley said. “I had to sit there for all of it because I arranged both pieces we did.”
Tonal Eclipse recorded an arrangement of Sober by Childish Gambino, and The Ahhx Chords recorded a mashup of Poker Face by Lady Gaga and In My Head by Jason Derulo.
“Up until now, Tonal Eclipse, and formerly OCUpella, has pretty much exclusively done live performances, so this was a new experience for everyone,” said Jeffrey Laughrun, music theater senior and managing director of Tonal Eclipse.
“We recorded each individual person on each individual voice part separately. And then the guy who did the recording and the editing and such took all those tracks and tuned them and got them timed together and put some cool effects on them, and it sounds really great.”
Kelley said the groups paid for the EP through Tonal Eclipse’s gigs, Ahhx Chords T-shirts, and other fundraising activities.
Kelley said he thinks the EP will be a good recruitment tool for both groups and the university. The EP will be listed under two separate artist profiles, one for each acappella group. Kelley said he plans to have them released by April 1.
Laughrun said the EP professionalizes the groups.
“I think it, in a way, legitimizes the groups,” Laughrun said. “Not that we haven’t been making good music this whole time, but in a more official, on-paper sort of way. It’s less a matter of, ‘we’re a bunch of friends doing this for fun,’ and it’s more so, ‘we’re professional musicians in training.’ I mean, we’re still friends and we still have fun, but it’s a step towards the professional world and perhaps the competitive world at some point.”
Kelley said the groups hope to hire Voices Only again in the future.
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