Sidingsound

Of children's songs and Santa

...I promise I'll be back before the festive season...

Well, I said that in my last post, and would like to keep my word after all :-)

A few moments of peace and quiet have descended on Walker Towers, affording me a brief window of opportunity to check back here before the Christmas festivities kick off in earnest. I hope you're all having a good run-up to the festive season, and that things are generally holding together for you.

The main things to report right now, are that Joy's students' piano CD project went well, and we've now begun our next recording endeavour: a bumper collection of backing tracks of children's songs, for a new activity of Joy's in the New Year. One motivation for doing this ourselves, was that we (OK, mainly I) didn't like the production values of many of the pre-school children's song CDs we've heard, and felt (correctly or otherwise) that we could do better ourselves. Whether or not this turns out to be true, we're going to give it our best shot...

The recording commenced last weekend, with me tracking Joy playing "guide" keyboard parts for around twenty-five songs (mostly nursery rhymes and other children's favourites). We did this so that my sister-in-law Charlotte could come up from her home ninety minutes or so away, and record lead vocals on as many of the songs as we could manage in the time, as we were assuming for various reasons that this would be the only chance we would get.

Ultimately, Charlotte was a real pro, and was able to sing on all but a couple of the tracks (and I even found time to double-track her voice on one song). We now have the basis for the rest of the recording work, and Joy and I plan to build the rest of the instrumentation around Charlotte's vocals, perhaps even replacing Joy's guide keyboards along the way. Joy's going to play piano and other keyboards, whilst I'll be contributing guitars, ukulele, recorders, bass, drums and anything else I can lay my hands on (!), plus probably contributing some extra vocals here and there.

I don't know how much we can get finished before the New Year, but I'm back to work pretty promptly after the 1st, so I'll really need to get my skates on and lay down as many tracks as I can whilst I have the time off. I will try and keep you in the loop as to how it's going, and what we're going to do with the recordings when they're ready.

Anyway, have a very happy Christmas Eve/Day/Boxing Day, and see you back here in the last few days of 2007...

Labels: childrenssongs, music, recording

posted by Tim @ 21:47