Musical rollercoaster

It's been a heck of a musical ride this weekend.

Saturday I went into the studio to record more track for Voice of the Spirit. And the result: I'M DONE RECORDING TRACKS! Well, at least, I am. The last track to record is a sax solo for Voice of the Spirit (the song). My engineer is getting a session guy in. However, we begin mixing it down this week! We're going for many short 1 to 1 1/2 hour sessions instead of marathons. It wil be easier to fit in since we can begin around 8:30 in the evening. The boys are pretty much in bed by then.

I was very pleased how some of the vocals came out. When you have a song idea in your head, it's kind of hard to really imagine how it will turn out until you put all the ideas on tape. I had harmonies in mind for some of the songs. However, when I double tracked the vocals (recorded the same vocal part twice) and added a harmony, the sound was bigger than I imagined. Like this HUGE organ playing monster chords. I was like, Is that me? I'm very pleased, to say the least.

Today at church was the total opposite. I swear every possible bad guitar thing happened. On the opening number, I lost all sound. Took me a few moments to figure out it was my effects gear. So I plugged directly into the amp. Did I mention I'm the only guitar player and our bassist was not there today? Songs work so well with just drums.

Next, I bumped my amp during another number and knocked my amp backwards. Since it has built in reverb, it made this nasty sound you hear when you pull on a spring and let it rattle. Then add distortion and feedback. Really nice.

THEN, I broke a string. With no backup guitar on hand. Luckily, we had a new guitarist show up to try out that wasn't playing. I grabbed his guitar for the next song and then changed the string. Plus there was the moment of excruciating feedback when I turned on my amp and realized I had my sustainer pedal on. It boosts the volume for leads. And feeds back like a MoFo when you're not.

On the plus side, our young drummer was impressed with my ability to quickly recover and move on like nothing had happened. Comes from years of playing live, where everything can and will happen. The cardinal rule is to keep playing. Which we did.

Hopefully next week will be a better Sunday musically speaking. But I should have the CD done by Christmas.

Comments

Popular Posts