Leaving for Nashville

It’s hard to believe the time is here! Here’s the plan. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be leaving at 5am for a close-to-seven-hour trip to Nashville, TN. We’re hoping the roads are clear and the traffic is minimal! We’re aiming to get to Nashville around 11am (Nashville time), we’ll grab some lunch, and then we’ll head over to David Davidson’s studio for a 2pm string session. We will be recording strings for 5 songs. The session will last anywhere from 3-4 hours. We’re hoping we can get everything tracked in 3 hours, as every hour is an additional $460! There will be 4 players – cello, viola, and 2 violins. Depending on the song, we will be recording 1-3 takes… for some songs, we’ll be layering multiple takes; for other songs, a single pass will suffice (as we will later be layering the real strings with sampled strings). All I’ll be bringing is a hard drive that I’ll plug into David Davidson’s Pro Tools system. After the string session, we’ll probably grab dinner with my friend Dave Bechtel. Later that evening, I may need to do some quick mixes of the strings – these mixes will be useful for the guitar overdub sessions the following day.

Friday morning, we’ll head over to studio guitarist Mike Payne’s place at 9am. The goal is to record for 7 hours with a one-hour lunch break. Mike needs to wrap up by 6pm. I’d like to track guitar overdubs for 12 songs - this amounts to just over 30 minutes of recording time per song. Again, I’ll just bring a hard drive and plug it into Mike’s Pro Tools rig. I’m sure we’ll we exhausted that night and will just want to chill out after a long day of recording! We'll return to Columbus on Saturday.

If you’d like to pray for us, here are some prayer requests:

(1)We’d appreciate your prayers for safe and quick travel!
(2) Pray that we’ll be able to get through the string tracking in a timely fashion on Thursday, and pray that the players will have skill as they play!
(3) Pray that we’ll have creativity as we record with Mike Payne on Friday. His guitar tones and playing are going to greatly define the sound of this project.
(4) Pray that Lord willing, we won’t have any technical difficulties!

Thanks for all your support! I’m very anxious to share this new music with you! It still looks like the album should be finished towards the middle of this year (maybe June-July).