Oceans of Creativity

Piecing It All Together
It’s been about a month since we recorded strings and guitar overdubs in Nashville, and since then, things have been quite busy here at 10x12 Productions. At this point, I’ve cleaned up most of the string and guitar tracks, and have pulled those tracks into my “main” Pro Tool sessions (the strings and guitars were recorded and edited in separate Pro Tools sessions to cut down on clutter with all the unused takes). I’ve also been busy working on programming the MIDI strings that will be mixed in under the real strings for a larger orchestra sound (I’m preparing a video blog which will explain this process in more detail). This is quite an exciting stage as I am for the first time hearing all of the “final” instruments together - with the exception of the real piano, which I hope to record in the next month or so. As mentioned in my previous blogs, I still need to record guitar overdubs for 3 more tunes. I am planning to track these guitar parts with Mike Payne next Friday, March 11th (remotely, over iChat, as he is in Nashville and I am in Columbus).

Practice Makes Perfect
In addition to studio work, I’ve been busy practicing with my live band (drums: Jim Davis, bass: Joey Bradley, guitar: Matt Meyer). We’ve been rehearsing almost every Saturday at Jim’s place (he has a nice finished basement space with an in-ear monitoring system). We don’t have any official shows lined up yet, but we do have a possible gig in June, which would have us opening for a national Christian act. We hope to start playing out officially in early summer (mainly regional shows at first).

An Overcrowded Boat
The creative process continues to be exciting and wearying. I’m currently working on a tune that is overly concentrated with instruments, and I’m trying to figure out what parts to cut out. This song has been driving me crazy the last couple days, but I think I am making some headway on deciding what to eliminate. Sometimes less is more. I’m a sucker for big production, but even with “grand” songs, you have to find a tasteful limit to the number of musical layers. Originally, the “size” of this song was built around some guitar power chords, a big organ, a couple synth pads, and an arpeggiating synth lead (not to mention a few drum loops here and there). As the song developed, I had Rich Barrett add some string parts, and Mike Payne added some cool guitar accents that I hadn’t originally envisioned. Suddenly, I was having trouble finding space for everything. I think I’ve solved some of the clutter issue by cutting out the organ and some of the pads for much of the song. I also lost the drum loop in the choruses, and pulled out the strings for the first part of the first chorus. Just like an overloaded boat, sometimes you have to sacrifice some non-crucial luggage to the sea for the well being of the vessel.

Video blog coming soon...