Heroically still in the vocal booth of BaseHQ to complete the vocal tracks of the songs, I am not looking too happy. The cold is still bad, despite all the medication and the rest. Thankfully, there’s someone who manages to keep the moral high…
"SO MANY PERCUSSIONS!!!" Peter having a fit trying everyone at once.
The beginning of the day is slow and bad. My voice sounds (and is) suffering from yesterday’s abuse and the cold. My throat is not hurting or anything, but the result just isn’t up to the standard I require.
We start the session with very quiet songs (or with very quiet parts) and with harmonizations on some of the tracks, courtesy of Peter (mostly) and Matthew. Peter is also feeling rough (I must’ve passed him my cold) and so we decide to take a break and record some percussion sound for an impromptu instrumental track whose idea I came out with last night.
Ever seen a meditation bowl?
When it becomes obvious that “Percussion Song” is not going to happen unless we ditch any hope to nail the vocal parts for the remaining 6 songs, I get talked into trying singing again.
It takes a couple of hours for my vocals to start carburating. Despite the usual problems due to the cold, my performances become more convincing as my vocal chords start warming up, to the point that, immediately after lunch, I can nail a couple of section that didn’t really happen during the morning and finish “Pills”.
From that point on, it’s a race against time. We do finish all the vocals, but I’m still not happy about some parts.
Matthew about to record a shaker on one of the tracks.
I will wait until the cold is gone and then arrange a session just before the mixing. There’s a lot of work to do with that, too, as we didn’t have any time to even start thinking about instrument balancing and EQing.
Still, we recorded 14 full songs (and 2 “tryout” pieces: “Percussion Song” and “Melissa”) in 8 days. That’s an incredible result by most pop standards!
The moral of the story
If you have a band of rock solid musicians and you have a vision, you can make good things happen in a short time.
