My story of our 2nd studio session wouldn’t be complete without a brief story about my experience recording lead vocals.

Carrie is our main singer and band leader, and for the most part, I stick to harmonies and guitar, with a little rhythm (egg shaker + tambourine) thrown in here and there. But there are a few songs–currently Denali, Green Wheat, and Pierced Through–that I take the lead vocals on.

After having an easy time getting clean guitar tracks during our first session and having a blast singing my heart out doing scratch vocals, I wasn’t really nervous about session #2. At all.

The situation: it was 1pm. Eric, Carrie and I were loaded in, tuned up, and warmed up, and our engineer Rick was ready at the mixing board. We had a couple hours before our friends Jon, Graham and Peter arrived to lay down their instrument tracks, so we needed to get lead vocals done for all the songs they were contributing to.

Which, for the purposes of this story, included Denali and Green Wheat.

Carrie started off strong with great takes on Scarecrow, Eloise, and a handful of other songs.

Eric continued, nailing his lead vocals on Dinosaur and Lucien.

 And then . . . it was my turn.

I stepped into the recording room and approached the microphone.

It had a funny little gold screen in front of it, which I’m sure serves some very important purpose.

And suddenly it was time to sing . . . for real.

As soon as I put the headphones on and faced that microphone, the nerves hit me like a punch in the gut. I felt that sinking/whooshing feeling, and all my breath support checked out of my body and went to hang out on another planet. Far, far away from my lungs where I really needed it to be.

“Rolling,” said Rick. The guitar track started playing in my ears. I stepped closer to the mic and opened my mouth.

guikgl

Somebody let me outta here!

Yes, I had a sense of humor about my own terror and hammed it up for the camera, but sadly that didn’t mean that the real terror went away.

I recorded a first take of Green Wheat–disastrous. Breathy, erratic, and the more erratic I heard myself getting, the more erratic my vocals became. But I pushed through the whole song even though I knew it was destined for deletion, just to give myself time to calm down and get into a groove.

After the first take, I turned to my bandmates and our engineer, who could hear everything from their perches on the other side of the glass. I couldn’t help but pity them all–nothing is more painful than sitting through an erratic performance by a nervous performer. I know from experience–it makes your soul kind of crinkle up and your cheek twitch.

“Um, wow,” I said. “Uf! Okay. I’m pretty freaked out right now guys.”

Oh, you guys. I psych myself out over lead vocals, purely because I know my part is the center of attention. Put me in front of the same mic to do harmonies, and I’m fairly calm and collected. But as soon as my brain registers “YOU ARE IN THE SPOTLIGHT, BABY,” something inside me clenches up and tries to wrestle my confidence into oblivion and beyond.

But that said, it didn’t make sense to be freaked out, dangit. It was totally irrational:

a) All three of these individuals had heard me sing lots in the past, so I had nothing to prove to them.

b) I’d been singing fine up until this point in this exact same studio, with this exact same group of people.

c) If I recorded a bad take, it could be deleted forever, so no horrible consequences were hanging over my head. In fact, I could record 100 million takes, and only the one I liked would ever be heard by the Peoples.

So why? WHY???

I just had to try and rationalize what was happening, or at least isolate some factors that I could perhaps control. The factors that came to mind were:

-I usually sing these particular 3 songs while playing the guitar–seated, and kind of hunched over my instrument. So standing up to sing them felt very different.

-When I stand and sing into a mic at our live performances (or at church), I usually hold the mic in what my husband calls my ‘death grip’ and kind of brace myself with the stand. Having something to grab that anchors me physically helps me feel more secure emotionally. I even rest my lips on the actual mic sometimes, especially if my eyes are closed, to maintain my sense of place and balance. So: standing next to this gold-screened mic with nothing to grab or touch, just my tall and lanky body hovering near it, made me feel unmoored. Unstable. A leaf in the wind.

With this quick (out-loud) psychological self-analysis complete, our engineer Rick (bless his heart) gave me a mic to hold that wasn’t even connected to anything–it was just something to grab.

Then he turned off the overhead lights, leaving only the red glow of the twinkle lights.

I sang in the dark for my next take, gripping the mic with all my strength, and alternately gripping my own arms and torso (and possibly collarbone? hard to say what I gripped during that frightening time).

The results: much better, but still quite wavery. By the third take, I was feeling waaaay better. So when we moved on to the next song, Denali, I was able to get it in one take–woohoo!

As of right now, Denali and Pierced Through are done, and I am pleased with the results. But sadly, after those 3 takes of Green Wheat, I decided to jump ship and leave it for another day. What’s that saying? “He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day”? Right-o.

So the lead vocals for Green Wheat will be attacked during our last session. I can do this . . . right?

Any recommendations for beating this frightful monster of nerves? Because it’s highly annoying.

My little band Thornfield has been BUSY! Saturday May 5th we headed into Handwritten Recording for our second studio session.

Just like the previous time, we got in around 12:15 to set up, tune up and warm up for a 1pm start time, and went ’til 7pm.

However, the experience was vastly different than our first session.

And I mean vastly different, in case you didn’t catch those bold letters.

You’ll probably remember that our first session was all about getting the basic tracks, with piano, guitar and drums playing at the same time, and the extra person singing what’s called ‘scratch vocals’ in the other room–not the keeper vocals, but just a guideline to keep all the musicians together. We were insanely efficient and on the ball, and our engineer said that it was the most productive session he’d ever worked.

Well, in this case . . . second verse, not the same as the first.

(But that’s okay)

The highlight of this session was bringing in some friends of ours: Jon Lin came in armed with his cello to track 5 songs . . . (here he is warming up)

. . . and the musical genius Graham Nelson came in with his mouth harp to track 4 songs.

Go Graham go!

Eric was practically drooling over Graham’s performance (and Carrie was feeling the love too). This guy knows his way around a mouth harp, and there’s no denying it.

Our friend Peter/Petras also had a bunch of bass tracks to lay down (and we can’t thank this guy enough for all his hard work).

So unlike the first session, in which we all played at the same time, aimed to get 2 clean takes of each song and then moved on, this session was much more repetitive.

Carrie would track the lead vocals for a song our friends were joining us on–for example, Scarecrow.

(accompanied by her constant friend: a cup of Throat Coat, the best tea ever for vocalists)

Then, this same song had to be tracked again later for Jon, with a couple takes to get it right.

Then, even later, Graham tracked the same song, a couple times, until he got a take he was pleased with.

Then, Peter tracked it too.

So it wasn’t “play a song and move on.” It was play a song . . . play it again . . . play it again . . . and play it one more time, with each person adding their bit one by one.

And please let me emphasize: this isn’t a problem–this is exactly what was slated to happen. Our friends did a fantastic job (truly, truly). The cello and bass and mouth harp are indispensable to the sound of these songs, and we are so, so happy they volunteered their time and energy and talent.

But . . . it felt slow. For Eric, Carrie and me, there was a lot of time just sitting on the couch listening to what was being recorded–and not just chillaxing, but listening carefully so that we could give feedback, encouragement, and our opinion on when a clean, keepable take had been achieved, and when there may have been a few measures that needed to be re-recorded and punched in.

So for us 3: a lot of sitting still while maintaining that focused attention on the music that was happening.

It was exhausting! And in an entirely different way than the first time. The first session was like getting high and injected with 5 doses of delicious caffeine, and using that crazed energy to run a marathon that you ended up winning.

(and this session may have felt like this for Jon, who–having never recorded before–went from uncertain to triumphant over the course of the afternoon)

For me however, this session was more like getting injected with caffeine but then being strapped down and unable to use that energy up in a satisfying way. It was productive . . . but felt unproductive. It was great . . . but didn’t feel great. I know the results were awesome . . . but I felt strangely deflated and useless by the end.

Besides tracking the guitar for Sunrise, re-tracking the guitar for Pierced Through, and tracking lead vocals for Denali and Green Wheat (more about that later on, hee hee), I sat on the couch. And sat some more.

And then a little more.

Anyway, I hope this isn’t a downer–the recording process is still going great. I just want to keep it real about how it felt going through the experience.

After the second session was over, as we were packing up our instruments, we booked a few hours for Thursday night with our engineer, wanting to get some more work done before Carrie headed off to a friend’s wedding and was off the radar for a bit.

And our Thursday night session (5-9pm) was–surprise, surprise–completely different again. It was just the 3 of us–me, Eric and Carrie–and it was fun. And productive. And felt productive. We were efficient, honest with each other, and tracked a ton of vocals, harmonies, and diddly extras. And after those 4 hours, I didn’t feel totally beat up from exhaustion either.

Our next (and hopefully last) session will be on Sunday May 27th. There’s a lot left to do: fiddly bits like tambourine, egg shaker and djembe, extras like melodica and triangle, a few remaining lead vocals and some harmonies–but the end is, for the first time, in sight.

Of course, recording isn’t the final step. Mixing, artwork for the CD, administrative stuff to get ourselves on itunes, copyrighting, etc. is still ahead–but hey. One step at a time . . .

. . . right?