Karen Taylor-Good enjoying the music
Jason Garner (engineering) and Chris Graffagnino playing it up
Chris G. listening to "The Life That's Chosen Me" for the first time
The recording process with Karen and Jason was a pleasure, Jason's skill with pro-tools and Karen's experience is wonderful. They had worked well together for quiet a time and it showed. The cozy studio and warmth of Karen's heart for this project was obvious. She really wanted this to go well!
I had a sound in my head that was very persistent for the month prior (it was driving me crazy actually) and was yearning to get it out of there, lol. Being my first time in a studio in about 20 years It was like old times. The equipment had changed a lot but luckily via the miracles of the internet I kept up a bit on equipment and had a pretty good base from when I had my job at Steve's Music Store in Toronto back in the day.
I have always loved production like this and usually it was a room full of reel to reel, large mixing consoles, etc.. that I was around years prior but too see this in a small section of Jason's garage studio was incredible. So simple. You really do have the world at your finger tips when you can play keyboards!
The first vocals were prepped with Karen just seamlessly roughing out the lyrics in her head (she didn't even to my recollection vocally prepare for this... a true master) then a first try at it. No windows to watch her just the speakers to hear.. Jason and I were listening carefully, beautiful first run of it. She talked it out with us on the "talk back" button of which I started to help him engineer it. Like old days.. lol.
We did a second sweep of it, amazing. The first piano intro showed her depth of her vocals better.. smooth. Very little ez tuning going on later in the process. Then another pass at the opening and viola she had it! This time we kept going and the development of the song connected.
Got to the bridge and this was a challenge. I had a very deep approach on this, the lyrics were always perfect in this song but at the point where it states "I need answers, I need help, it's so much work... and a miracle or two sure wouldn't hurt" was dramatic for me. We had a little bit of a tough time connecting the lyrics with the arrangement at the point where it "streisand's" the lyric ... it's the LIFE that's chosen me and we kept passing through this and I remember asking for it too be really built up because she had no idea that the guitar was really going to be the lead on this and I needed her to take the lead over it. At this point I opened up the studio door and offered her a picture of my two boys, both afflicted with Autism in different ways but needed her to sing it while looking at them. It worked.. goosebumps!!
That belt out of "it's not the life that I've chosen,... it's the life that's chosen me" was the hook, the title of the album and ultimately the banner statement that would connect the song to completion. We continued to tweak the vocals but we pretty much had it and off to meet with Chris Graffagnino a well known guitarist/session musician who had a larger studio and plenty of space to spread out.
Note: Karen was kind enough to stay through out the sessions, as that she was excited to be in the studio to watch the process but for someone who has been doing this for quiet a while it was nerve racking for me as that I knew that the critical part for me was always matching the guitar's strength with her sweet lyrics and melody.
Chris's guitar collection made me envious, his pedals, etc.. were huge and vintage ruled in this studio. He listened to the tracks a few times without any prior listening to get the feel and then setup the layers and layers of guitars (8 I think in total?) I got to pick the sound through his experience and developed it.. loving every moment of this I took advantage to shoot the breeze over the sound. He seemed to really get into the sound I was looking for and I talked his ear off with nervous excitement of guiding this process!
I was in heaven, for about 4 to 5 hours we just recorded, lead lines, rhythm, 12 string electric.. went on and on! We got to points where it was finally out of my head, this sound. This was the second day and back to Jason's studio we went to complete the basics. Back at the studio Jason burned rubber to merge the comp'd vocals and guitar lines. It was coming closer to completion, Karen did a run of it uninterrupted and had a few changes to some delay and reverb elements. I had a few adjustments.. phew!
The next phase helped to establish a companies direction...
Randy Grossman
CEO HwH Records
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment