Recently in Recording Project Category

Last Friday, Jacob and I finished the lead vocals for Jesus My Great High Priest and Before I Knew. I was super sleepy the whole session. It's getting kind of boring watch Jacob edit vocal parts. The novelty has worn off. But, I am thankful for his skill and taste. The final product sounds great. I'm hoping to have a few finished up to the point that I can put something up on my myspace page for everybody to hear.

House Update:
We continue to wait. Everybody is moving very slowly. The loan is taking a long time to approve because it involves approving contractor bids in addition to the house itself. Meanwhile, our contract has expired and so the house is technically back on the market. The seller has kept it off of realtor.com and has taken down the sign, but they would not do a second extension on the contract without a loan commitment. So we are trying to remain optimistic that everything will turn out fine when the loan comes out of underwriting. We are also preparing to walk away for the deal if it gets too crazy. We might lose a lot of money, but we use that as an excuse to lose a lot more money.

Congratulations to President-elect Obama. How cool that the USA was able to finally elect a black man! I am also glad that Barak Obama professes to be a believer. May the Holy Spirit lead him in every decision.

The title is of course a reference to "Finding Nemo" because I feel like I have a delay fish swimming around with me. Jacob and I go through phases of extreme productivity and then phases of stagnancy. Jacob had to cancel two weeks in a row because of various issues. I'm not frustrated with Jacob; delays and schedule problems are a fact of life that he's dealing with right now. Jacob's day job is with Starbucks and as you might know, they are going through a retooling process that has involved layoffs, store closings, etc. So, I know that Jacob has been preoccupied with a lot of that.

At the same time, I am preoccupied with the house stuff on top of normal family and work responsibilities. Whenever Jacob has to cancel, my first response is usually, "Oh good, now I can hang out with Sarah and the kids." I don't want the recording to get put on the shelf, but maybe that's just going to have to happen over the fall. Being an independent artist means that I have to fit recording time into my 40 hour a week day job as well as take time to give lessons to pay for the additional costs. God has been so good to get the project this far, and as the song says, "He didn't bring me this far to leave me."

Please pray for this recording that Jacob and I will find good times to work. Pray that Sarah and I will be able to have quality time even with this added schedule commitment.

Yesterday, my friend, Ryan McMillian contributed his excellent piano skills to the recording on 8 of the 12 tunes. I was amazed that we got so much work done! Ryan has a very easy and relaxed style. There's a kind of patience or peace in his playing. He's also very solid; he nailed the part on the first or second take. I suspect that his church experience makes him very good at learning changes, form, vibe, etc on the fly. Ryan is the music director for Chesterfield Presbyterian, a graduate of Belmont in Nashville, and he's got a lot of experience for a young guy including having worked with Michael Card.

Jacob pulled out some cool vintage gear for Ryan to do his magic with. He mostly used a Mark II Rhodes piano and a dusty Wurlitzer that we had to pull the top off of in order to work out a scratchy volume knob. At the end of the session Jacob set up a Clavinet (think Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious") with a Wah Peddle for "Walk the Talk" which is now also referred to as "Rock the Wah".

I became quite giddy when we were working on "Greater Is He Who Is In Us" and Jacob dialed up a phaser effect on the Rhodes. As Homer would say, "Mmmmmm...Phaser Rhodes."

Don't have any idea what I'm talking about? Here's some videos to hep you get some idea of the different sounds these keyboards make:
Rhodes
Wurlitzer
Clavinet

This past Friday, Jacob and I got together to finish up our work on Search Me and to get started on Jesus My Great High Priest. I have to confess that this session was a little dry in the creative department. I felt like both of us were out of ideas. We experimented with different stuff, but J.M.G.H.P. was not really inspiring us too much. At the end of the session, Jacob started to develop some cool ideas with an acoustic in an alternate tuning. We decided to wrap it up for the day and, Jacob would do the acoustic part before our next session. It was kind of a bummer, so this weekend, I've been playing around with the song some to get the creative juices flowing.

In the meantime, Sarah and I are consumed with house hunting fever. Let us know if you know of any cool houses up for sale.

Yesterday's session we started to get into a really good rhythm of forming ideas, getting them into the computer, and moving on to the net idea. We completed My Eyes Are On You and about 1/2 of Search Me. We set dates for 3 more sessions in September, so I am excited to be getting back in the saddle.

My Eyes Are On You
Jacob completed the bass line this past week before the session and added some backward guitar effects, so we dove in with some cool tremelo chord sweeps, then added my Albert King wanna-be lead licks. Then we cut the vocal part including backing vocal Ooos that were a lot of fun. Then we re-cut the rhythm guitar part to make it a more choppy pattern. I really like the results.

Search Me
It's really hard to commit to ideas on this song because it is so dear to me, I don't want to mess it up. We started out by turning on the track, grabbing guitars, playing ideas, and then picking out what we liked. After I cut the bass part, we ended up doing this rotary speaker sound on the verses that we're going to double with a 12 string next time. I added some chunky electric chords over the whole tune in the John Mayer vein. Then we doubled some of the electric stuff with this tiny old guitar from the 50s that Jacob had that sounds kind of like a mandolin or a ukulele. I know you're thinking that we're crazy, but it sounds really cool. It's getting this very Beatles vibe. Next time we'll do the 12 string stuff, do the vocals, and then put in on the shelf until the keyboards day.

Yesterday, I took a day off from work to do another session with Jacob. We had not been able to get back into the groove since the end of July when we did the bass tracking. We kept having schedule conflicts and communication problems all through August. So, I was really excited to be back in action yesterday.

We spent the day doing bass, guitar layers, and vocals for Thorn In My Side. It was really great to get into the creative aspects of building the song. We were passing the guitar back and forth, throwing out ideas, and hitting record before we got too analytical. I was a little disappointed at first to give up the guitar playing role for the entire project, but it was kind of cool to be on the other side of the guitar and be able to listen for ideas without just falling into habits or to analyze. My jazz experience is great, but sometimes it makes me a little too nerdy about music. I can start to analyze a line thinking, "what would be hip here? Maybe a major 7 or a flat 9." Sitting on the other side of the guitar, I was more likely to hear a line in my head first. It made my ideas much more musical.

I think the final product sounds awesome! The song still needs a little percussion and organ before it can be put in the ready-for-mixing file, but it is basically done! 1 down and 11 to go.

After we stopped working on that, we began to do some of the bass and guitar layers for My Eyes Are On You. However, a long day and a lack of caffeine began to get me down. Jacob pulled the plug when I was starting to glaze over. My son woke me up at 5 in the morning, and I was really feeling it 12 hours later.

I want to get the recording back into gear by setting up a consistent time every week that we do a little work on it. It's been very hard to accomplish because I have not wanted to give up nights and weekends. That basically leaves my Monday's off and vacation days. To make matters worse, Jacob has his own schedule and sometimes it doesn't sync well with mine. I want to have a variety of possible times during the week, so that I can be more flexible when Jacob can't do a Monday. As we wrapped up yesterday, we talked about next Friday, and we were all set to go until I remembered as I was driving home that I will be in route to Tennessee on Friday, D'oh!

Yesterday, I returned to Sawhorse Studios to record bass parts with local bass master, Eric Grossman. Eric had an excellent sound and I was very pleased with the final product. We were able to complete the bass for half the tunes. We focused on the ones that needed a really hot bass part. Eric did a great job despite the fact that I failed to get the charts to him until last Friday, and he was too busy to be able to look at them (he was on tour in Texas.) I wonder if I had given him more time to prepare, if we would have been able to track more songs. Oh well. I am trying to decide whether to pay for another day with Eric because he has a really great sound.

I have to say that it was a tense session. Jacob has a day gig as a manager for Starbucks, and in the middle of the session, he found out that his boss was laid off in a corporate downsizing kind of deal. Combine that with Eric being a little flustered with my obtuse songs that are not very easy to pick up on the fly, especially when my charts didn't exactly represent the form (or even the changes) very well. Sometimes a chart can do more to confuse the player than to help.

So Jacob would like to take the next session to focus on one song and try to get it more finished with layering guitars, keys and whatever. He said it will help to give us a little mental and emotional boost to hear a song start to sound more complete. I hope we can get a lot done before I hit the busy fall season.

In other news, Samuel is getting his first tooth. He also caught the cold that I just got over and Joanna is still wrestling with.