From the Studio - Take 9

What a week. I just got back from an excellent mini-vacation in upstate New York - three days of horseback riding, food, sports, food, falling in a lake and food. Highly recommended for anyone.

But, vacations must end, and there's still work to be done, including work on the album. I think this is about our eleventh three-hour session, and things are moving well.

Last week was the first week that the vocalists hit the studio. They recorded some background vocals for "Tell the World" and got some verses done as well. The vocalists will be back in the studio next week, and most of the remaining time will be for them.

Last night, though, was about music. We had to accomplish some stuff; specifically, we wanted to track the music for "Draw Me Close to You" and "We Prepare the Way," as well as track drums on "Mighty to Save."

We almost accomplished that. Chris was unable to attend, and he will be playing drums on "Mighty to Save," so we skipped that. "Draw Me Close" to you got done. At first we were going to just play to a click, but it was easier to have the drums track at the same time, so that's what we did.

"We Prepare the Way" is more piano-driven, at least in our arrangement, so we had Justin and Elyano track piano and drums, and then Danny and I tracked guitar and bass. Justin wanted to redo his part as well, so we did that to.

There's still some music left - We have to do drums for "Mighty to Save," acoustic for the last chorus of "We Prepare the Way," and I want to do an short solo entering the bridge to "Mighty to Save." That and some accent work with percussion, and the music is pretty much done. We'll have the vocalists work the next few weeks, and come back to do those bits in probably one session. It seems easy to get frustrated when you're working with the same songs week in and week out - I think we can all use a couple of weeks off from playing them, and come back to finish fresh.

The songs sound completely different with vocals over them, and what I'm hearing is making a world of difference. I've heard our vocalists singing "Tell the World," "One Way," " and "Say So" over the music in rehearsals, and they sound awesome - and that's without any plugins and over rough mixes. The finished project is going to be amazing!

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