One Last Basic Session
There’s been a long stretch between postings, due mostly to the end-of-summer busy season - lots of things going on, mostly work-related. However, I managed to schedule a final trip on September 13 to record the basic guitar tracks and vocals for the last three songs for the project: “Love On A Dime,” “I Got My Doubts About You, Boy” and “I Can Sing A Country Song.” All three songs are old, written in the late Seventies, but they stand up pretty well anyway.
As it happens, I can’t seem to ever stop tweaking them, though. “Country Song” has a guitar lick/riff that is a challenge for a weak guitarist (me) to play consistently, particularly while singing, even though I had been working on it for some weeks in advance. It took a number of passes to get it down perfectly. Fortunately, Steve could cut ‘n’ paste it into the several places it needed to be, (Bless Pro Tools), thus saving his and my sanity as well as my fingers.
The vocals went down quickly and, in just under three hours, we were finished. Steve burned me a copy of the tracks, including the drum machine tracks, we unloaded the copies of the paper I brought and I headed back to Louisville.
I assembled all twelve tunes and burned several CDs to give to musicians who I thought might be interested/available to appear on the record, including bassist Steve R. and his wife, Debbie, who’s a pretty good singer. (Steve last recorded on his daughter Jenny’s CD in Nashville.) They were both downtown at the Wednesday jam that night at the BBC on Theatre Square, an event that happened to be one of the livelier ones of recent weeks. We played until past 11 p.m., with lots of sing-a-long songs plus original stuff in the mix. Our friend Diana, who teaches flamenco dancing, showed up after a long absence and did a bit of samba/flamenco dancing with castenets, though she begged off anything too strenuous, as she had been rehearsing since 4:30 in the afternoon and was tired.
The effort to start shooting a TV show at the jam got several boosts, too. Paul C., Diana’s husband, said that he had some friends who did TV production who were interested in helping with that project as well as an original rock show at another club. Brian W., whose father hosted a children’s TV show in Columbus, Ohio in the 60s and 70s, said he would use his networking friends to sell all the advertising we needed, since the budget we have for this project is ridiculously cheap, and Danny R. seems to be close to nailing down the cooperation of the owners of the bar. Brian, of course, is interested in promoting his music - as we all are - and Danny wants to be the host. The rest of the crew seems to be cautiously attracted to the idea of being on television. At any rate, it should be useful in selling CDs once my project is done.