Recording a song incrementally sure does suck!

[MrKnobs]

I'm finally in the mastering process of our new album. I'd hate to tell you how many years we've been working on it, but the long time delay is largely attributable to our use of guest artists.

 

Not only do they have limited availability (we waited more than a YEAR for the string arranger to get to us), but each time someone comes in and cuts their tracks it substantially rewrites the song. This is not necessarily a BAD thing, but it's certainly a time consuming thing as those of us who have already played parts generally want to redo our parts to accommodate the new ideas. Using that process we all need to be careful to leave "room" in the tune for unidentified others who will play later.

 

So, someone has to have a "vision" for the songs that survives the test of time. That person is mostly me, and sometimes I'm less of a visionary than I'd like. Once in a while my "vision" is forced to improve by these fantastic players so that I actually need to recut the basic tracks and start over on the song.

 

One positive thing from this ordeal though: Every guest artist is a fantastic music lesson! Sometime in the middle of this album I started video taping everyone's sessions sync'd to the guide track. The idea was to have handy tight shots to cut into our videos, but I soon realized it was instructional as well. It's already made me a better piano player and would make me a better drummer if I was at all coordinated.

 

For instance, here's our guest keyboardist Dave who taught me quite a few piano tricks from his various videos. Maybe I should approach him about recording some instructional videos....

 

m4xifx2MWD0

 

Terry D.

[flanc]

Wow...that's impressive! The fiddle player is tearing it up too.

[callous]

Jerry Garcia once said that recording an album is like building a ship in a bottle, while playing live is more like rowing a boat on the ocean. The two require very different approaches to "making music."

[wallywanker]

great stuff, keep putting it up on youtube. always loved female vocals fronting a band, makes me wish i had some of my sig material on film... your style of music and the `presence' of your band appeals to me.