Ah my F Harp's. An ancient low F Lee Oskar donated by my teacher, a High F and a new Low F wood bodied Hohner. Neat-o!
Pete mixing Company of a friend.
So far this week we have had a Guitar Session for Rosie, a harp and vox session for me and we've started mixing.
Rosie can post his own blog about his session, but suffice it to say that he and Paul seemed content with the result, and as they're terribly fussy about all that Guitar Stuff, I am guessing that means the Solo in Hollow Tree (citation needed! lol) is up to scratch.
So by the next session, it was my turn to clean up the solos I had laid down in earlier sessions because I didn't like anything I did. Paul very helpfully let me off the hook by suggesting that I just Trill for 4 bars. I did not hurt him.
So what do you do when you have a solo that you think is fairly uninteresting? Repeat it in a different Octave! I am not sure whether this concept is going to survive mixing, but we tried tracking the solo on a Low F after laying it down on a High F. Sounds weeeiiiird. Its either Super Brilliant or ARGH!! Dont know which. But thats what mixing if for. Whew
What? We're mixing? AAAAAAAAH!
Ahem.
Oh yea, then I had to do the solo on Southern Bells. I have tried shirking the responsibility but that didn't work. Actually, it was for tall timbers, but nix there too.
There are several schools of thought on solo creation. One way is to do individual idea phrases and then string them together on the recording system. The other is to Get it Right.
n my first session this week for Southern Bells I tried, but it Just Wasn't Right. Feeling a mite cowardly, I opted to move on to something else and return to it in the next session. Duly, it was the first thing I tried on the next session. Take 1 and Three were on the money. Got three good takes in 5 minutes. Go figure.
Nonetheless, with the exception of Snowys song (still not happy with the vocals) we were ready to begin the mix.
Session 12 started with Bad Traffic Saturday in Sydney. Its coming into summer now and everyone decided to go driving, with a few break downs on major arterial roads causing chaos. Where IS everybody???
That left Pete, me and Colin (who dropped in to check out the session) sitting around talking trash about the music business. Ok, maybe that was just me.
When the guys arrived, it was time to crack on with the mix. One of the reasons Colin dropped in was to see some of the Minutiae (as Pete calls it) of the recording process, and if you've been following the videos, you'll see the discussion and idea-wrangling that goes into this stuff. Here's Pete flexing the mighty muscles of his mind.
Using this mix as a basic guide to the effects, levels and sound of each instrument, we're now ready to move on to the rest of the tracks. In fact, I'm due back in there in a few hours.
We're keeping the pressure on to get this completed and we'll (hopefully) have a few more sessions coming this week (we'll need'em). Stay tuned!