Recording studio time!

This week we started recording The Fun of Phonics songs at a local recording studio – exciting! It was a little bit of a slow start: me calling some local friends and friends of friends to help with the recording. My ‘big idea’ was to have a morning rehearsal with everyone at church and then go to the studio in the afternoon. We started gathering ‘slowly’ on Friday morning, then Rachel (my incredible intern from CVAP) and I started teaching the songs. Perspective: Rachel and I had spent a considerably long time over the past couple of weeks writing standardised notation for these songs. There were some long mornings in local coffee shops singing about goats, fish, monkeys, etc, and singing over and over until we hit the right pitch and could get it on paper. We wanted to do this first before Teacher Catherine would then transcribe this into local notation for our revised teaching manuals.

So… we spent the morning at church practising, it took me a lot of effort to track down a drum, the local harps were readily available and then finally in the afternoon we went to the studio. Isaac, from my church, works at PACTA – a recording studio which is part of a community based organised working with alcoholics. Long story short – Isaac is amazing! He put down the melody first on the computer after Rachel, Catherine and I sang to him – he was incredible! Taking minutes to note down each song (rather than our hours!). We should have gone straight to the studio and just took directions from him – why on earth did I think I knew any better?

So after two days, we are part-way through the recording. It is taking a lot longer than I anticipated, however I am quite excited with what the end product will sound like.