In the studio with the Barking Spider

This has been in the works for a long time. I have not been allowed to blog about it until now.

The past two Saturdays our church music team has been in a recording studio. We are one of the few churches that has songs which are Bible verses set to music. And since four of the five of us are over 50, we decided that we needed to record these songs for posterity.

The studio had a lot of Styrofoam in the ceiling and the walls. We were set up in the Beatles style. The two ladies, melody and alto harmony shared a mic, and so did the male melody singer (that's me!) and the tenor harmony/guitar player shared a mic. A padded wall separated us. We were circled in towers of foam in which to soak up sound. The other non-singing guitar player was in his own little padded room. Dan Smith, our engineer, chose not to give us headphones in which to hear ourselves. Since we were rookies he wanted to make it as close to our Sunday morning live performance as possible. I'm glad because I don't think I could take hearing myself in the headphones.

We spent about five hours in the studio each day. Boy was I beat! I took some getting used to singing without seeing my fellow singers. While we were listening back to our work, the female melody singer (which is my pastor's wife), was telling stories of when she worked at a very famous recording studio in New York called the Power Station back in 1981. Name dropped a few guys, like this 19-year-old kid who worked there named Jon Bon Jovi.

My work is done. All that's left is overdubbing percussion and post production. We recorded 130 minutes of music and we need to pick 80 minutes for the CD.

One more thing. On listening back to the recording, I realized that I can't stand the sound of my own voice. I have to take the word of others that I'm not terrible.