Recording vocals

Tonight was the third session in this series.

One thing I learned after the first two sessions, when it comes to coordinating studio schedules where several musicians are involved, is to pick a focal person and coordinate everything around that person's schedule. The first session, the focal person was Cindy on keyboards. The second session, the focal person was Aaron on drums.

The focal people I wanted to bring to the third session were not available due to summer travel. However, David (guitar) suggested that he and his wife Diane (vocals) come in and do their parts in the same session so that they would only have to make one trip to the studio. Now logically I would not plan to do vocals and guitar solo in the same session, but the circumstances directed that this was my best option since I wanted to move forward and not wait until August. So David and Diane became my foci. Steve O and Vern were both available tonight as well, so I had four vocalists (including myself) plus one guitarist.

This was a challenge for me because it was the first time I'd done a session with multiple vocalists - in past projects I've always worked with one vocalist at a time.

It was particularly challenging syncing up the vocals on Thank You. There are many syllables and most lines are sung in unison, so it is very important to get the syncing bang on. We did a couple of run throughs and found we were most off on the verses; the chorus and tag were fine. A couple of run throughs of verse 1 and it just wasn't coming together. So we did it line by line and finally got it together the best we could. David then added his guitar solo to the instrumental and added some picking to the tag, and that was the evening.

There are still some guitar and vocal dubs I'd like to add, but those will wait; I'd like to move on and start recording some of the other songs.