yep, i know i still owe you descriptions of 7 more songs from the album “corner”, but right now i’m throwing together kind of a demo for the boss of a music school who offered me a job as a jazz-vocal-teacher. i can’t post the tunes because they weren’t written and recorded by me (except the vocals of course). but it still was an interesting experience – the most interesting thing about it was the speed…

after quite a while of studio-abstinence i felt like a hired gun again. go there – do your job – get out. i always loved this kind of work, even if you have no real control over what’s happening or what’s being done with your tracks afterwards. what i like about it is the efficiency, the professionalism – dig it! so i thought of this as a studio gig and approached it that way. i went to my recording room, set up the laptop, the audio interface and a tube-mic – did some gain-staging (i wanted to link this to some nice article that explains gain-staging in an understandable way but couldn’t find one! maybe you’ll have more luck, i’m simply not able to explain technical stuff with my crappy english. in a nutshell, it’s about setting the gain right in every part of your signal chain, so you have a loud and clear signal without noise or clipping in the end…) and had a go!

i then recorded vocals for 12 songs in about 3.5 hours – two takes for each track and one take of backing vocals for one song. that makes 26 takes total (incl. the first one i did as a test) + setting up the gear in less than 4 hours. i don’t know about your experiences but i’d say this is pretty fast – and a whole lotta fun it was. it just feels great to be productive like that, to spend 4 hours and then go home with an usb-stick full of decent material. although i haven’t done such vocal recording sessions in a while, and therefore felt a bit rusty, it turned out very well. i picked 6 of the 12 tunes to be on the demo, but they’re all good enough – it was more about having different things to offer.

so i dare you to go out and speedcord (just made this term up :-) ) something, anything, just like that. instead of sitting around and complaining about that one missing piece of equipment or about whatever it is you’re complaining about. once i was in a band with a guitarplayer who was not able to record anything in over six months! not a single note. we wanted to make an album, did some test-tracks and when it came to the real thing, he took the DAW home to do this (so noone else could do anything…) and that was about it. six months later i dared to ask how it’s going, only to hear that not one single note has been recorded by him – he was still trying to find the right sound! maybe he still is – come to think of it, i’m pretty sure about that. so the only thing that happened quickly with this band was me packing my stuff… nothing worse than time-thieves and the world is full of them!

go speedcord!

Tags: Arts, Backing vocalist, College or university school of music, Demo, Jazz, Music, Singing, Song