We've mostly been recording vocals lately, but we still have a few musicians coming into the studio. There's something undeniably special about recording a whole band at once but it's also really cool in a different way to work with one musician at a time. Each person brings some new magic to the songs. Usually when they first start playing and warming up in the studio, I want to say let's just record them playing their own music! Because they're all so great. It just makes me want to make a whole album of drums, or a whole album of saxophone... someday :) Then when these beautiful people blend their playing into my songs, I'm made even more aware of how each person is contributing a part of their own being to the song. Sometimes music is just so amazing that it doesn't even seem real.
I wanted to share with you the work of some of the most recent guests we've had at our sessions. A couple of weeks ago, Seamus Egan of the awesome Celtic band Solas came by to play on a couple of songs. Here's a great video from Solas where they all seem to be having so much fun.
And last weekend, we had Tom Tallitsch in to record saxophone on a different track that I can't wait for you to hear. For now, here's a clip of Tom performing his own beautiful music.
So the latest from the studio is that we've started working on vocals now. Each of the songs is pretty different from the next and needs something of a different vocal approach, and I am really enjoying the process of finding that. Fortunately there's also somebody hanging out near the mike for moral support.
We still have a fair amount left to record with the musicians as well. I'm getting a lot of ideas for a video for the first song... hopefully we'll be shooting that pretty soon!
One of my favorite things in life... bonobos jamming with Peter Gabriel. I first heard about this a few years ago in a lecture given by BioMusic researcher Dr. Patricia Gray at UNC-Greensboro.
The video below shows the bonobos Panbanisha and Kanzi playing the keyboard when Peter visited the Great Ape Trust research center. The bonobos use graphic symbols called lexigrams to communicate with their researchers. The beginning of the video shows lead researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh talking with the bonobos about what they are going to do. After Kanzi plays (at the very end of the video) he wants to go out in the room with Peter and Tony Levin -- well, I would too!
We still have lots more to do but I love this part of the process,
meeting so many amazing musicians who help us to create the world of
each song. I just posted a little fans-only peek... if you're not already on the email list, you can sign up here (or like us on Facebook) and get the link to an exclusive video from inside the recording studio.
I haven't been able to get up to NYC as often now that things are so busy in the studio, and Tim has also had a lot of other projects lately, but we've still managed to stop by a few times this fall at the wonderful open mic at Bar 82. Host Wayne Kral is so the man for keeping this night running. Below we are playing one of my favorite songs, Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" -- one of the few covers we've done. I've always loved this song (from the album The Future). It took LC ten years to write. I was thinking to say more about why it inspires me but I'll just let it speak for itself.
Things have been full steam ahead for the past week or so and the tracks are starting to take shape. Finding the right part for each instrument can be challenging, then suddenly it's quite magical when we find it. I'm really happy about how things are going so far. I don't know how much to tell you about the new music... maybe I should keep things under wraps so as not to spoil the surprise!
Yesterday was an especially awesome day, so we decided to take pics holding instruments that none of us had played.
hey
Today, Ken Pendergast was in again to play some way cool bass on two more songs. Since it was all rainy and misty, it seemed like a good day to find something for Osmosis Song and it was :) Now we have the bones... drums and bass... for five songs...
We have been doing lots of preproduction for the rest of the songs and now we're finally back recording, yayyyyyy!
Today was all about the big big drums for three different songs that range from jungle-y to jazzy. We decided to do these three songs first because even though they have different styles they are probably going to share some instruments in common.
First Jeff did that miking magic that he does, to get us a big awesome sound.
overhead mics talking to each other
pillow that Jeff had to deliver out of the bass drum before we started (not out of that string bass, fortunately)
you can see where it came out... its twin is still in there I think
We had to cover a lot of different stylistic ideas in just one session, but Charlie is such a versatile drummer that he gave us lots of cool stuff to choose from. We only just got started with the third song so we'll come back to that one next time, as well as cutting drums for 2 more songs. Then we'll be adding other instruments on top of what we got today.
