November 3

Recorded "Love You Overload" and "Let Me Make You Smile, Girl" with Rich Clemons at his Beach Club Records studio. Generally excellent session! I prayed a lot leading up to it that I'd be able to do a good job on the songs and fulfill my vision for them as well as possible, and God answered my prayers, praise His name forever! On "Love You Overload" in particular I was able to deliver just about the exact performance I was going for, with a little help from Rich and his multi-track magic to fix a couple of rough spots. "Let Me Make You Smile, Girl" went only a little less ideally, and I'm pleased with the result there too. Unfortunately Rich has been very busy lately and was underslept as it was, so he ran out of gas before we could do the 'mix down' on the songs, doing all the fine tuning to get everything balanced and adjusted just right before turning the layered files into playable WAVs and MP3s. So I'm going back next week to finish the job with him. I've waited a long time to get these songs done in a sharable form, so I can wait one more week. Besides, I'm just grateful that Rich was willing to do as much as he did with me today under the circumstances. Next Thursday he'll be better rested and thus at the top of his game for the crucial 'mix down' session. I can hardly wait!

November 10

Rich and I did the lengthy 'mix down' tonight, including editing the non-singing portions of the vocal tracks to eliminate noises and lower the volume of some of the bigger breaths, and adjusting the volume in places in the singing, as well as equalizing the volume between the different tracks that were created when we re-recorded several rough spots. Among other things, lol. Anyway, at one point we discovered that one of the re-recorded tracks didn't save properly. It took us a while just to figure out that it hadn't been lost while we were working, but rather had never been saved correctly at all the previous week. Then we had to figure out how to fix the problem. We could have recorded it again, but that would have involved setting the studio up for me again and me getting fully warmed up, which would have taken a while. Fortunately we were able to come up with another way to replace the track with existing recording using copy-and-paste and careful editing. By the time all this was done, however, it was getting late and both of us were running out of gas again, so once the mix down was complete we called it a night, and saved the final stage, the mastering, for another time soon. Another frustration, but it's certainly helping teach me greater patience!

November 17

Did the mastering session tonight with Rich and produced the final files! Just because it's me there were a few problems with the process (mostly my fault though!), but we got it done, and I've just uploaded the finished files and am about to open the site. This is very exciting, even more so because it took a couple of extra weeks to get to this point. My vocal performances are flawed, so even Rich with all his technical magic couldn't make me sound like a professional, but overall I think I did a pretty good job of presenting these first two songs of mine that I'm sharing with the world. I look forward to getting reactions!

HOME