Thanks to tons of very awesome people
who believe in me and my music, this morning
I departed Seattle (with my family)
for Five Acres Studios in Abbotsford, British Columbia,
to record my debut album "Run Free".
Abbotsford is only about 2 hours away,
but given the fact that we have 4 kids,
we arrived at the studio 6 hours,
and 1 border crossing later!
This put us there about 6:30pm.
The studio is a renovated barn
in the backyard of the owner/producer's home,
on a peaceful - you guessed it - 4.7something acre lot!
Ryan McAllister, the owner of Five Acres,
lives on this lot with his wife and 4 children.
We have much in common!
We unleashed our kids from the "torturous"
hours in the car, and they ran around wildly
as we adults chatted for a bit.
Around 7pm we got started on pre-production.
Pre-production is pretty self explanatory.
It's everything you have to do before
you can actually record - playing through songs,
making changes, planning etc.
First we dealt with the business/money matters
to get them out of the way - no one likes this part,
especially Ryan. He would do it all for free
if he didn't have a family to support!
I will be recording a total of 10 songs with a band
for a full album (YAY!), as well as
recording acoustic versions with my husband
on cajon for 4 of the songs.
I played through some songs for Ryan.
I would pick one of the songs
that will be on the record, play it for him,
then get his feedback.
He would tell me anything that he is
"hearing" - specific musical or vocal parts,
changes to the structure, lyrics etc.
We would discuss these ideas and agree
on a direction for each song.
As I played through the songs,
Ryan sat with his guitar
and played along, or sang along to
"feel" the songs and come up with ideas.
We spent the evening working on
improvements to March On, Eyes of a Child,
and No Going Back. Ryan had some great ideas.
They're gonna be awesome!
This was all we had time for today. Tomorrow we will make scratch tracks for the songs we worked on tonight. A scratch track is a simple recording of guitar and vocals only, that I play to a click track (metronome) to be sure my tempo is exact. This will not be used in the final recording, but it is used for all the musicians to play to, so that their tempo is exact. Yeah, tempo is a pretty big deal on a professionally recorded record. :-)
We finished up about midnight, rolled out our air mattress in the studio, made up some beds for the kids, and pretty much passed out.
Big day tomorrow! I'm so excited! Living in a dream...
To get a glimpse into my "home"
for the next two weeks, here is a video of
Ryan giving a tour, and telling the story of the studio.
Please take a few moments to watch it. It's excellent!