Empty Orchestra start singing. The music was pumped up and we had a mini party, with mad dancing – that was a memorable scene to film." The filming introduced a number of technical challenges, with the producer Adam Tandy explaining that the simultaneous singing and conversing made production particularly difficult: "To record it all 'clean' and have options in the edit, that was technically hard on everybody." Typically, karaoke scenes in television will see characters sing only the opening lines, but because of the format of "Inside No. 9", the characters in "Empty Orchestra" sing the whole song. Each character sang a
Empty Orchestra wholly told through song, but this was not possible. For Shearsmith, the reality of this was difficult to maintain; on the episode commentary, Pemberton expressed a wish that there was less dialogue. The closest example to the original intention of storytelling wholly through singing in the final episode was the performance of "I Know Him So Well". Nonetheless, the resulting episode, for Pemberton, was "a kind of musical", in that "there's music all the way through it". While he would be interested in doing "a proper "La La Land"-style musical" in the future, "Empty Orchestra" serves to "[tick] that box