Ahhhhh…

That was the sound of a satisfied sigh. Yes, friends, today was the first day of recording at Spaceway Studios.

The day started around 11 a.m., and after meeting Jeff (my contact man) and getting a tour of the studio, we met up with Will Hunt. Will and Jeff are soooo nice and made me feel really at ease in the studio. I enjoyed talking with them and picking their brain as they set up the mics and cables and checked the levels and phase…and a plethora of other technical stuff that is quite beyond me.

After playing the songs for Will, we got crack-a-lackin’ and recorded It Was Me. Ahhhh… (yes, there’s that sigh again!) I forgot how wonderful it felt to play a real piano (and a grand, at that) after having played a keyboard for so many months. There is nothing like the feel of the action of a piano, of putting your whole self into it, of reaping a sound that reflects the emotion feeding it, a sound that goes beyond the little “volume” slider and built in speakers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful for my roommate’s Yamaha keyboard (yay for weighted keys); but, man, there’s NOTHING like a real piano. Ahhhhh…

And Will didn’t make me play to a click track!! How liberating. It was wonderful. Click tracks and I have a very, um, dysfunctional relationship. When I play to a click track, I get so focused on the beat that I lose all emotion and it ends up sounding very mechanical. (but I am fine playing with actual drums…go figure)  Anyways, no click track today, and it was a beautiful thing.

After It Was Me, we tackled Let It Go, and then Through the Ages.  With each song, we recorded about 10 takes or so.  Out of that batch were usually 1 or 2 really solid ones, and the rest of the takes gave us material to play with in case we needed to patch it in other parts of a song. Every now and then comes that “perfect take”…but more often than not you record a really great take but it has a small “hiccup” somewhere in the song. Thanks to ProTools (and Will Hunt), you can use that part from another take and plug it in and voila! A SUPER solid take!  Now, I’m definitely all for excellence in musicianship.  But, man alive, it’s a lot easier (and time-efficient) to fix that little hiccup than to scratch everything.

We recorded Through the Ages, but we’re going to re-do it tomorrow morning.  After listening to it at the end of the day, Will and I agreed that it was slightly too fast.
Tomorrow’s agenda: knock out Through the Ages, do vocals, and…ahhhhh.