Studio blog 15
October 12, 2009
Okay, so I was in the studio again on Saturday, October 3rd. It was yet again, one of those… left my house with an idea of what I wanted to work on but wasn’t 100% certain. This seems to be my MO so… I have to just run with it, I guess.
I’ve grown so accustomed to the ride to the studio and it’s both amazing and frightening how I will just go on auto pilot and end up “there” and realize I’ve been really deep in thought and don’t recall any particulars along the way. (My apologies if I ran over anyone’s slow moving pets or grandparents.) For whatever reason I always seem to snap out of it on 27 right as I’m passing Frandor. There’s a billboard sign that use to always advertise whoever would be playing at Soaring Eagle Casino next. I remember a while back it seemed like for the longest time Kenny G was up there. I swear they ran that ad 6 months before he played and just kept it up the whole time. I would always think of the scene in Wayne’s World when Garth was getting a root canal done at a Kenny G concert.
Anyway… I was relatively certain that I was going to work on an instrumental that I had actually laid some lead guitar tracks down on about 6 months or so ago and then got frustrated and bailed on. The hard part about this song is that I really wanted it to be special. I mean, I want them all to be special but this was the music that I played at my dad’s funeral. I guess I would call it a… family song. It was a piece of music that I had written and Bill (Kitley) and I at my dad’s funeral. I felt that I played so horribly on the one day that I really wanted to do it well. So… for the recording of this song… I had to make up for it as it was after all, for my dad. While Bill always accompanied me on acoustic guitar for this, he played bass on the track with Dave Foreback playing drums. I had layered acoustic guitars and clean sounding electrics as well as some strings on keyboard. I was happy with it and it was ready for the lead guitar tracks.
When I got there I had Jeff pull it up and I gave it a listen for the first time in probably six months or better. I was very surprised at how much of it I liked. Actually, I really liked it. I don’t know what I had gotten frustrated at when I was last working on this and perhaps I just needed a fresh perspective. A long session working on the same part can be stressful. The song has always been about a 7 minute song with the last…. 3 minutes being a mild tangent. I ended up cutting easily 2 minutes off of it. Pretty much jumped in where I left off and finished it up. I did some overdubs and did some harmony leads and accents in spots. I told Jeff it was done and to move it to the “Completed Music Folder” but… after listening to it non-stop for the past 9 days I do hear a few very mild tweaks I need to do. Easily do-able in one more session.
What I do like about this song is that there were so many very spontaneous things that I was able to do. Again, I have some ideas but I never really know what I’m going to do in this situation. Something will always hit me and I’ll play it out and see what happens. In this case, I hit some accents that I really liked and found some harmonies that are definite keepers.
One more session and hit one is completely done. Then I just have two more songs to do leads on and ALL the music for the CD is done! Then I just have to do vocals on 5 or 6 of the songs and the vocals are done. Yes, for the 8 million people that have asked, I am doing the vocals myself. Nothing to write home to mom about. The long and the short of it is that this CD is a guitar player’s CD not a singer’s CD. I’m hoping for people to take note of the guitar playing not necessarily the singing. Some songs require words and therefore vocals. Initially, I had wanted a singer to sing them and had even talked to three different singers over the years. But now that it’s coming right down to it and the end is in sight… I’ll just do it myself.
More to come… stay tuned.
Traceman
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