August 10, 2009--Recording

I got to do something fun today that I've never done before--I recorded a song. Our friend in our band has a buddy who has a recording studio in his home, and he's done recording for about twenty years. He said he'd record an album for us for $250, and our friend's mom gave him the money for it.

It was a really interesting experience. He's going to record us all individually and then put us all together, and I got to go first. He started by getting me an electronic beat off my keyboard that I could hear in my headphones. It won't be on the final CD once he gets our drummer on there. Then I played keyboard and he recorded that directly into his system. I sang along, but he wasn't recording my voice at that time. And then I went again and sang along to the music I had recorded. I sang it twice and I was happy with the second take. The first one I felt I went sharp on a couple of notes, and I had him turn down the volume of the music so I could hear myself better. I did get one word wrong, but I'm not going to worry about it. I sang "but" instead of "'cause" once. I don't think it'll make much of a difference. He said that with his equipment he could go back and we could fix just that one word, but he doesn't really know how. He's got a lot of equipment that does a lot of different things, but he doesn't know how to do everything on it.

Next Erick has to go in and record the bass, and we have to add the guitar and drums. I don't know yet if I'm going to do the background vocals myself or if my friend is going to do it. She's going to try it first and see what she thinks.

We just worked on that one song today. We did a song my brother wrote called "Laid It All Down." That's the one song he got professionally recorded. He gave us permission to record it, too. We're going to do another song he wrote, and a couple that I wrote, and some songs that my friend wrote, and then probably fill the rest of the CD with hymns. We're thinking probably about ten songs altogether would be good. We figure we should keep to songs that are originals or public domain so we don't infringe on copyright laws.

It was a lot of fun. I loved that cool microphone--it was so sensitive I could hear myself breathe! I can't wait to hear what it sounds like when it's all done. I'll have to get some of them up on MySpace or somewhere so you can all hear them.