Monday, December 01, 2008

Winter Melody: Song Club hits the studio

I spent the morning wrestling with the click-track of Garageband, trying to make a backing track to take into the studio in the afternoon; not being a strummer, my timing was drifting hither and thither, with the blip blip blip of the metronome nagging me at the centre of my skull.
Then I did a perfect version minus a verse; then a version where I lost my place in the chorus and couldn't remember if I'd already played a bit of it or not; then I realised that I was recording it through the computer microphone and not the line-in.
Exasperated, I made a giant cupatea and the ears-rest did me good.
The next version was fine and I burned off a CD and stuck an MP4 on to my USB drive as a back-up.
I'd forgotten Chuck Warner was going to call from the States, but we had a nice chat about all things female-musical 1970s/1980s, and I know we will talk again soon. He's going to send me some music and I'm looking forward to that.

It was time to go down to the school and collect the children. They were all there, loud and with their packed lunches, and Sejal was there to help. We made a shouting crocodile and shouted up the road in the bitter cold (why didn't their voices scare the frost away?), crunching to a shouting halt at the kerbside, folding together like an accordion before expanding again as we crossed. They stumped down the narrow stairs to the studio and into the live room, and subsided on to the floor where they rummaged in their Tesco bags for their peperamis and crisps. Lee had set up a couple of microphones and we did coats-off (no velcro, zips or rustling anorak material to spoil the singing), and launched straight into it. The song came together second-take, and we managed to do a harmony too before they trooped into the control room for a fidgety listen. It's more of a boisterous shout than a song, in places, but I felt proud of them because they are so young and they got into their gig like a bunch of mini-pros. In less than an hour, the lyrics were de-blutacked from the wall and we were off back down to the school, much too fast because it was downhill on the way back and childrens' legs are set to auto-run on downward gradients, pre-fall. Every so often I had to slow them down as the angle between their heads and their feet became dangerously acute.
We had a listen when we got back. It was great. I had had a nice day, and so had they.

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