June 4, 2008
Day 2 wrap-up
We completed the drum tracking for the other 7 songs:
I Am My Beloved's
Walk The Talk
Thorn In My Side
My Eyes Are On You
New Creation
Your Presence Is Here
My Refuge
It was exhausting, but now we can move on to the next phase which can be done in shorter times slots. I set up a schedule with Jacob to meet for the next three Monday afternoons. Next Monday we'll work on some acoustic parts. Over the next few weeks I have to nail down what I want to do for each song so that we can get a plan for how to schedule our time.
Joe Meyer did an excellent job playing the drums. He was pretty amazing to watch because he could usually get the part exactly right on the first take and we'd do another one just to be safe.
I was able to bring home the drum parts with the scratch vocal/guitar stuff. It was pretty cool to bring it home and put it on the CD player. It's real tangible progress.
Please continue to pray for me. Pray that the Lord will provide us with more financial resources since the entire project is being paid for out of pocket. Please pray for Sarah and my kids because I will be gone a lot. Please pray that I will not be ashamed of the gospel of Christ as I share these rather emotionally vulnerable songs with the non-Christians I'm working with. (I felt so embarrassed sharing "I Am My Beloved's" with the guys yesterday. It's the most Jesus-is-my-boyfriend kind of song I've ever written.)
Posted by Kirk Ward at 7:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 2, 2008
Day 1 wrap-up
I am tired, but we successfully completed the drum parts for:
Jesus My Great High Priest
Before I Knew
Search Me
Greater Is He Who Is In Us
Rejoice In The Lord
A lot of my fears that I shared yesterday were completely relieved. Jacob and Joe were extremely easy to work with. They gave me a lot of good feedback without pushing any personal agenda for any song. Joe is a really fun guy who is full of one liners, and Jacob is a great guy too. It felt like I was back in college with my old roommates Mason and John. Joe is an excellent drummer who did anything I asked, but I usually didn't have much to say because he derived just the right sound from my scratch guitar/vocal stuff. Jacob is extremely talented as well. He knows Pro-Tools cold and knows how to get just the right sound. At one point, he heard something that Joe was playing that wasn't quite right. Jacob immediately stopped and got a new floor tom. Suddenly, it sounded exactly right.
Jacob and Joe are both young guys like me. I think that really helps too. I feel like I'm working with peers. Extremely gifted peers who can do just the right things, but they didn't make me feel like a neophyte.
We'll see how tomorrow goes. In some ways, today was the easy day because we did songs that I know really well. Tomorrow we'll start working on the songs that I'm not too sure about. I need even more confidence now to trust my instincts about what is gonna make a song sound good. It's a good thing that the battle belongs to the Lord. Thanks everybody that prayed for me today. Don't forget to pray for me tomorrow and Wednesday too.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 6:59 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 1, 2008
The Day Before
Tomorrow, I officially begin recording my second CD. I'll go in at 10:00 tomorrow and we'll be doing the drums for about 3 days. Jacob Detering will be at the controls and Joe Meyer is the drummer. I have no idea what to expect. In my first recording experience*, Rick Dickerson was the producer/engineer/drummer for the whole project. He did all the drum parts while I wasn't around using V-Drums or loops. So I don't know what recording all the drum parts without any other players will be like at all.
I've been writing a lot of new songs lately because this project has provided a good reason to feed my creativity with time and intentionality. "Your Presence is Here", "Thorn In My Side" and a couple others have not been tested in church yet, so I am a little nervous about including them in the project. It's hard for me to just trust my own judgment. I wish I had a producer telling me what to do. Jacob is doing some producer type things to help me, but he's also been neutral about my songs, not giving much criticism or suggestions. Maybe that will come in the next few days.
I was pretty stressed out on Friday afternoon. I felt really inadequate to the job. I don't generally have really firm ideas about my songs. I like to write flexible music (it kind of has to be for church applications.) As a result, it's pretty hard to nail down specific arrangement details. So, Friday I was freaking out as I thought about Joe sitting in the studio waiting for instructions and me completely unable to make up my mind.
Please pray for me to embrace the gospel in this recording experience. I need to have the security of knowing that my identity is in Christ and not in my producer/performer/songwriter skills. I need to trust God to fight my battles, to seek first the kingdom, and cast my anxieties on Jesus with thanksgiving.
*Actually my first recording experience was in high school with my rock band, Celiac Spru. We did that recording by tracking the whole band at once. It was just like performing except with a really long sound check.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 7:12 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 25, 2008
Song Video: Thorn In My Side
I shared the lyrics to this song this fall I think. We had a really rough fall with Sarah's pregnancy and I wrote a couple of songs about going through hard times. This one came to me in one evening. I think I might have written the bridge later that week, but other than that it was one of those quick songs that writes itself.
Click the extended entry to see the lyrics.
Continue reading "Song Video: Thorn In My Side"
Posted by Kirk Ward at 8:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 15, 2008
Recording Project '08: Dates are set for the first sessions
June 2, 3, and 4 I'm set to begin tracking the drums. I'm really excited that this is finally happening. I know that it was always just a matter of getting up the gumption to go ahead and start, but still it feels pretty crazy. I don't have any time frame for completion, so I know that it will take a long time.
I wrote another song this week that I feel pretty good about, and I might even want to get it onto this recording. I might try to demo it or maybe just record myself on youtube singing it so that you readers at home can give me some feedback.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 3:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 8, 2008
New Song: New Creation
I have tamed the Cakewalk beast and finally completed my first ever demo. It's pretty rough, but it gives a decent idea of how the tune goes.
The song was written as an obvious nod to the African gospel music that I have spent the past 3+ years trying to understand. It is intended for corporate worship and so it has pretty simple form, but I think it would be great with horns and full percussion and 3 guitars. Yes, Paul Simon did it first, but Africa is the wave of the future as far as the Christian church goes, so we should get used to it, right?
The message of "New Creation" is that faith in Jesus comes with a promise: the old is gone and the new has come. So it's a promise that can encourage us when we feel defeated, but it can also be a warning for us to examine our hearts. The ending vamp goes through a long list of old/new characteristics. It will play a lot better live as it builds and builds to a climax.
You can check out the demo on my myspace page.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 12:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 15, 2008
A Real MySpace Page
Ok, I promise that I really do have a myspace page now where hopefully you can listen to some of my songs.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 8:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 24, 2008
My Prayers Are Answered!
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional leaders reached a tentative deal with the White House Thursday on tax rebates starting at $600 apiece for most taxpayers and business tax cuts to jolt the slumping economy. Families with children could get even larger rebates.From STLToday.com
My money problems are solved! If only we had planned to have our baby a few months earlier.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 12:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 23, 2008
Recording Project '08: Despair
Friday's meeting was fun and extremely helpful. I got a lot of really good info and the studio is an excellent option. I spent about an hour talking with their chief engineer. A couple tips he gave:
-expect to spend 10 hours (recording+mixing) in the studio per song
-hiring pros saves time and so it might end up costing less in the long run
I got some more leads from my friend, Paul, who is going to a church that just did a recording with another studio.
Last night, my wife and I sorted out our money. We hadn't worked out the budget since October, so November and the dreaded December spending was not worked out until last night. Of course, 99% percent of the time when you sit down and look at how much you spend it can be really discouraging. (Ignorance is bliss!) On top of that, I had made a mistake in my Excel doc that made me think I had a few hundred dollars more than I actually did in my recording project fund. D'oh! I gave me an awful sinking feeling.
One thing I learned from my Friday meeting was that I have only saved about a third of the funds that I will need just to cover the studio fees. Throw in the costs of paying musicians, post-production, design, manufacturing, and marketing and it is really overwhelming.
To add salt to my wound, this morning I watched a video on Worship Matters where Bob Kauflin is talking about there latest recording which comes out this Spring. As I listened to him share about his recording I was filled with a powerful sense of bitter envy. I thought, "Listen to him talk about recording like it was just the easiest thing, like one morning he just got up and decided to just go ahead and do a recording." I started feeling helpless and hopeless. I thought, "I will never be able to record my songs unless I just make crappy little home recordings on some nasty old four track tape recorder that no one will hear or care about." I'm a little bit disgusted at what my heart was telling me. I hope you are a little disgusted, too. That would be the appropriate response to sin.
Soon I felt convicted of my sin and I began to realize what foul thoughts I had indulged. Why should I despise Sovereign Grace Ministries for the fact that they have spend years and years pursuing a ministry of producing worship music that is contemporary and Reformed? In Rory Noland's "Heart Of The Artist" he lists envy as one of the sins that artists are most prone to commit. I certainly fell prey to my sin this morning.
A couple weeks ago, MTW missionary Mark Berry preached a sermon on 2 Chronicles 20. It is one of my favorite stories in the bible. It's about Jehoshaphat, who trusted the Lord to fight his battle when a great army was coming to attack their nation. I like it because there is a lot of music in the story. In the story, Jehoshaphat cries out to God saying, "We don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you." I've been trying to incorporate Jehoshaphat's prayer into a song I've been working on recently that is inspired by Albert King's "I'll Sing the Blues For You".
When I came into work this morning, I start to play this song that I've been working on and I was struck by how appropriate the song was to my present situation. My envy came because I completely lost perspective of who God is, who He has made me to be, and what He's doing in me. I realized that I have no idea what to do about this recording. I have no idea how we'll come up with the money to produce it or what will come of it after it is done. Instead of putting my eyes on the Lord, I looked at the impossible circumstances, at my own selfish ambitions, at the success of someone else, at the choices I've made in the past that have made this process more difficult.
Lord, I don't know what to do...I've been looking in the wrong direction...help me to put my eyes on you.
Posted by Kirk Ward at 10:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack