Recording sessions

Monday, January 28th, my old buddy and bandmate, Chris Greig came down from Bundaberg to spend a couple of days with my family and me. We had a great time and my kids loved hanging out with Chris!

I had my final session with Brad at Top Cat Studios on Monday December 17th.

During this session I worked on three songs - Brother Sun, Sister Moon, In The Beginning and Lucky.

Last week, on Monday, November 13th, I went back into the Top Cat Studios with Brad and worked some more on my vocals. Again I'd had about two days without any coffee, suger, diary, etc. and taking easy with my voice. I find these precursors are a necessity where recording vocals is concerned! By significantly lowering the overall level of mucous-creating stuff in my diet, and by being a little less strenuous with my voice prior to the session, I can ensure that I'm at the studio with the best possible set of vocal conditions. And it certainly paid off!

A couple of weeks ago, on Monday, October 15th, I had another session in the stiudio with Brad. The main focus of the day's work was to see if I could improve upon the vocal melody line I already had in place for Seesaw Marjorie Daw.

Had another fruitful session in the studio with Brad yesterday. I've been recovering from a cold and so singing was not going to happen, so instead I played with several ideas for additional acoustic guitar lines in one or two songs.

Hi there.

A big "thank you" to Sebastian from Tanzania, for reminding me that I'd not yet fixed a whole bunch of hyperlinks within my site. I've now gone and sorted out most of the broken links.

The updated pages with newly working links include:

Yesterday, August 27th, 2012, I was back at Topcat Studio's working with Brad on the some of the remaining songs from my album.

First up, I sang some backing harmony lines for Merlin's Song, creating a call and response style emphasis on certain melody lines. By doubling the harmony lines and panning them left and right, I create an accenting affect which answers the main vocal and also differs sonically to the central melody.

G'day again. It's been a while since my lasts blog entry ... I've been overseas in Paris and Scotland with my family - we had a beautiful time! While in Paris I caught up with my old school buddy, Chris Cody of the Paris-based Jazz ensemble, the Chris Cody Coallition.

Had another good session on Monday. It was a miserable day - constant heavy rain, but we managed to get into the studio.

I started off with my children, Jessi and Ewan, coming in to add a few more nursery rhymes to Seesaw Marjorie Daw. We had mixed success with this one - we couldn't quite get Jessi and Ewan "blending" properly! That's sometimes tricky for adults let alone a 6 and a 9 year old! Not sure if we can use the result, but we got a few nice laughs on tape. Hopefully they'll slot in somewhere!

Had a great session at Top Cat Studios today. A long one – 7 ½ hours! I managed to cover a lot of ground, and we’re really nearing the mixing stage, which is very exciting! I started by adding a low strings sound to beef up the bass in the song, and by singing a couple of stereo backing vocal lines for Sword in the Stone which answer the main melody. These additions have been really effective and have brought the song to a ready-to-be-mixed stage.