O Little Town of Bethlehem (Part ii)

I'm up early this morning. I had a hard time getting to sleep, because of how pumped up I was about my time in the recording studio. And I got up really early because my wife had a bit of an asthma scare (she's OK - she could not find her Ventolin, but we found it.) So I have had very little sleep.

Let me tell you about my small part in my church's plan to make a Christmas CD.

I showed up at Fat Dog Productions about fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be there. The studio is housed in an A-Frame house that stands all by itself along Ottawa's Hunt Club road. I opened the door and let myself in. I could see the control room, and there were two young men, an engineer and a guitarist, working on a pop song in there. At first I couldn't see what instrument the guy was banging away on - it sounded like a keyboard-sample of a guitar at first it was so clean.

I looked around the office. I have to say I have always loved recording studios. They are not built like most workplaces. Where most offices are built with that professional, business-like sanitized look, recording studios are almost always built for comfort. There is usually a kitchen, there are always couches everywhere you look, and there is usually a kind of "organized mess" feel to them. The lighting is always ambient - you won't see fluorescent tubes or any other kind of typical office lighting. Fat Dog was no different in this regard. The fact that the studio is in a house, and not a standard-style office helps create that relaxed studio ambience. On the wall was a sign that said, "Professionals learn something new every day. Amateurs already know it all." I pondered on that wise thought for a moment.

The main engineer (and owner) Chad showed up a few minutes after I got there. The church's music leader, Chris, arrived a few minutes after that. Chris introduced me to Chad, and said to him that I had more experience in the studio than all the other church musicians combined. Mindful of the "professionals" sign I had just read, I was embarrassed. (I have had a lot of experience in recording studios, going back nearly twenty years, but like a lot of musicians, I consider myself an enthusiast who gets excited about new experiences in the studio, rather than dwelling on past glories.)

Chris told me that he had thought about it, and was more than happy to do any arrangement I had worked out for the tune. It would make for a more diverse record. For my session, I had brought a CD with tracks that I laid down in my basement studio at home. I do this - whenever I hear about some great musical project I am going to be involved in, I get really excited, rehearse my brains out, and go into the basement and rehearse the recording. As over-enthusiastic as usual, I stayed up until two in the morning on Monday working on ideas. I'd laid down the ideas so fully formed that I brought them with me on disk.

Chad played a mix of the arrangement I had done for Chris, and Chris liked it, and started having ideas immediately. Chad loaded the track files I had prepared into the Cubase software, and Chris started playing along on the piano. The percussion track I had on my mix was rudimentary, but since I knew the beats per minute, Chris was easily able to replace it with something that sounded remarkably like real drums, even though it was just MIDI (a kind of music programming language for computers, keyboards and drum machines.)

After he recorded his drum performance, Chad was able to go through the drum track, and move elements of the performance around - taking out a kick drum here, adding an extra snare there. It was fascinating to watch. Even though I knew it was theoretically possible, as I have seen MIDI editing tools for years, I had not seen it at work in the hands of someone so capable. When I first went in the studio in the winter of 1986/1987, this kind of editing was just not done. Music was recorded to large reel tapes, using audio, and not computer interfaces. If you had to fix a small mistake in a performance, you had to recreate that portion of the performance and "punch it in." Now, "punching it in" is a technique of last resort.

Chris said that he wanted to play around my singing. I had recorded a voice track, a guide vocal, on Monday night, but it wasn't very good, and Chris needed to hear the song as it would be sung on the recording. I went in to the large high ceiling soundproof room where singers and acoustical musicians perform, and went through the song a couple of times by way of rehearsal, while Chris experimented with piano sounds. Because I'd done "O Little Town of Bethlehem" in such a seventies style, trying to invoke Steely Dan, early Dire Straits, etc., Chris suggested a kind of electric piano sound popular from that era (the Wurlitzer/Fender Rhodes for the musically inclined.)

I blew the vocal the first time through. I had gone out of tune, out of time, and I blew the lyrics of the second verse. I didn't get nervous about this - that's just how it goes in the recording studio. One take wonders are rare. I did a second take, and although I was not completely thrilled with my performance, it was fine, and I was not embarrassed about it. (On a compilation record, you can't be too much of a prima donna :)

One thing that I'd done almost randomly was start to scat at the end of the song. My arrangement of the song had me singing in a kind of quiet understated way, and as I told Chris as I got out of the booth, people would know it was me if I didn't holler at the end of it (I normally sing loud, high and boisterously.) The scat portion of the recording needed work, so I punched in a new part and then a harmony to it. I worked harder at that harmony than I had on the original recording, since I was trying to harmonize with an improvised scat.)

Chris told me that he was going to try and talk D & C (the brother and sister who founded the music group that I'm in) to add some vocals to the recording next week. Then I got my real treat - Chris played some of the material he had recorded with some of the other churches' singers.

These are fantastic singers. First, I got to hear one fellow singing "O Holy Night," my favourite Christmas song. He had done outstandingly; the studio can be a tempting place for a singer to overdo a song, since unlike in live performance, you can fix your mistakes. But he had not - he kept the right sense of reverence while giving full voice to his voice, as it were. He played me another singer, a favourite of mine. She sang an old French hymn, and it was lovely. She has a voice very similar to Charlotte Church, and such a voice works extremely well in romance language music. She has another song to sing later in Latin, and will have to teach the rest of us how to imitate her pronunciation.

Anyway, I went to bed last night and thanked God profusely for having been given such a wonderful experience. My prayer was Psalm 63, and I practically hollered it as I got to the line "When I think of you upon my bed, through the night watches I will recall that you indeed are my help, and in the shadow of your wings I shout for joy."

St. Augustine was surely right. He who sings prays twice! What a wonderful gift music is, not just for the listener, but for those privileged to record it, too! :)