Post-production begins!

I'm off to Toronto this weekend and am taking with me the early mix of the 13 songs for the new CD. I'll be meeting with my final mix producer Douglas Cameron over the weekend to pass along the tunes and lyric sheets to him.

Douglas is a master instrumentalist and wonderful singer with several recording projects to his credit. John and I are really looking forward to seeing what finishing touches Douglas will suggest for this album. We've left quite a few 'blank spaces', ie. solos that haven't been done yet, etc. for him to fill in or to suggest players for, so we'll see what develops over the next month.

Stay tuned!

The final song list

So yesterday we decided to pare down the song list. We were in the process of working on 18 songs, and I knew at some point I was going to have to make a decision about which songs to keep on the record. In order not to put too much time and energy into the songs we would eventually defer to a future project, we've put aside 5 songs and now have a comfortable, lucky 13!

The drum tracks are in!

We got the drum tracks back from Kid Carson in Toronto and I couldn't be more pleased with the results. His playing adds amazing energy to the tunes. Long-distance recording has its challenges though.

We recorded the 'bed tracks', that is basic guitar, bass and vocal, to a click track (an electronic metronome) which was supposed to make his job easy. Unfortunately I'm not used to playing to a click track so I played slightly ahead or behind the beat in places. Luckily with the recording program Sonar, John was able to synchronize these spots so that everything lines up on the beat. It's not an exact science though, and sometimes there's patch-work to do, but all in all we're happy.

Thanks to Kid for his great work!