WorshipCentral

It's been a pretty full on day. We've managed to track the vocals on four of the songs. The morning started with 'The highest and greatest.' Again we've been working through the songs in sections. So with 'The highest and the greatest,' we'd sing through verse 1 and chorus 1 for about 8 or so times. It often takes a while to get the voice warmed up and to get the right feel for the song. Eventually it started to click together. Nathan is very good at pushing me hard. No chance of slacking off!

We then moved on to verse 2 and chorus 2. After we had nailed that we looked at the bridge and final 3 choruses. The great thing about recording vocals in this way is that you really push yourself throughout each part of the song. We then ended by going through the outro of the song. The vocal all in all probably took about 2 hours. Next week Nathan is recording a choir to go on this track is well. Should soound cool.

Next up was a song called 'Out of the darkness.' We treated this song in a similar way to 'The highest and greatest.' This was really fun to sing. For each song I've tried to capture an image in my mind - a thought or a scripture. This helps to keep a worshipful perspective but also helps me to dig deep to capture more passion and emotion.

After this we looked at 'God of Justice.' For this one we sang it all the way through until the bridge - 'fill us up...' With the verses we were looking for a more breathy and intimate vibe. Trying to capture elements of brokeness and desperation that are caught up in this song. When we looked at the outro section we tried to replace some of the ad-libs that were taken from my rough vocal (rough vocal being the vocal that we recorded back in July when tracking the songs in UK - usely these are taken as guides and then redone at a later date). In the end the rough vocal sounded so much more intense and emotive that we ended up keeping them.

The last vocal to do was 'Everything.' This song took a long time to do. There are so many parts to this song and you're constantly moving from quiet moments and screaming your lungs out. Anyway we got there in the end.

After dinner we came back to look at some bv's. We messed around a lot with singing melodic lines to sit underneath the lyrical melody. We looked a putting some effects on the vocal to distort it. I guess your using the voice as an instrument to add texture to all that's going on. We've just finished playing around with vocal ideas. A lot of it is trial and error. See what works. Try a few crazy ideas. Laugh at how stupid they sound and then back to the drawing board. We had a few Bee Gees moments. But I'm pleased with some of the ideas.

Once I'm done here Nathan will tune the vocals (with his magic tuning device). He'll then comp it all together taking the best bits. He's already added some keys, acoustic guitars and electrics. We need to record some strings and a Gospel choir for a couple of tracks and then we begin mixing.
It's all slowly coming together!