For the last several days, I’ve been working on a side project; an entry in a Great Big Sea karaoke contest that Anna wants to enter. The band released some instrumental tracks from the new CD and said ‘get creative’ with the audio and video; the only rule is no lip-synching, it has to be your voices on the recording; winner gets backstage passes and such.<\/p>\n
Anna’s in charge of video, and I’m musical director for the project, my part of which just wrapped up tonight after several days of recording and engineering on a tight schedule. I’m not sure they were anticipating extra lyrics written for the bridge, a ten-voice choral harmony brick, or an added irish bouzouki track, but that’s what they’re getting. It’s embargoed until the video goes up – I’ve shot a bunch of video for Anna already, we’ll be shooting a lot more next weekend – but I’m really pleased with it.<\/p>\n
I like these side projects because they’re fun, but also because they teach me things. This one taught me more things about timing, a fair bit about really precise level control, and some things about staging. They’re all recording talents, but I need those too. Working with other people’s material lets me learn how to match what they’re doing, which means I learn how to do things I don’t normally do. So if you’re trying to learn any of these skills, I recommend it. It’s educational.<\/p>\n
I also got to get some idea about how I deal with other people in the studio. I was in charge here, and the buck does stop with me on the audio, but I really think I did a pretty good job at helping people get their best performances recorded, giving all these different people the levels of help and direction they needed. And I could tell that it helped having a clear artistic direction to communicate to them; I think I got it across most of the time, tho’ occasionally it took a few re-explanations to get it properly out of my head and into theirs.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’m pretty excited. Tomorrow I go back to working on Stars, and hopefully I can apply some more knowledge, like I did with Shout at the Desert<\/a> after working on the Buckaroo Banzai fan project, “The Diesel-Driven Eight Dimensional Jet Car Blues<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Next show on the 20th, Juanita Bay asking me back. Back to work!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the last several days, I’ve been working on a side project; an entry in a Great Big Sea karaoke contest that Anna wants to enter. The band released some instrumental tracks from the new CD and said ‘get creative’ with the audio and video; the only rule is no lip-synching, it has to be [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10549,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/10549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}