Recording “Somebody’s Walking On My Grave”
After we had been playing “Somebody’s Walking On My Grave” for several months and found that the other musicians who had begun to come around liked the song, I decided I needed to document the song - record it. As it happened, the owner of the Lexington School of Recording Arts / Long Island Recording Studios, Wil Freebody, had been after me to come down to Lexington and visit his new building and record something. Of course, he wanted me to write about it for my newspaper but I generally thought it was a fair trade and an honest deal, since Wil worked very hard on his business and tried to ‘give back’ (as the trite expression has it) to the community. Besides, recording time is expensive and any opportunity for a struggling writer to record para nada is a major temptation.
So I called him and arranged to drive down, along with my bass-playing buddy, and knock out a rough demo. I figured that I could write the story up with a ‘first recording with a neophyte,’ namely Michael. (The story is here: Recording With a Neophyte”)
We drove down one afternoon after Michael got down teaching the classes he had and we whipped out the tune fairly directly, skipping the problem of playing against a click track, which allows for easy editing, drop-ins and such later on. I didn’t want to add any additional stress on Michael’s first experience (or time to the process, as playing with a click track usually requires several attempts if you haven’t been practicing with a metronome regularly.) We did the tune with an LIR producer, Michael Thomas, supervising the process, which made the whole thing much easier.
As we left, Wil asked when I would be coming back and recording some more. I laughed it off and said whenever I had a new tune.
Driving back, I began to think about how I might actually be able to make a record; by the time we got home, I had worked out what I thought would be a good deal for both Wil and me; which was to document the entire process in a blog, posted on his website and mine, with the purpose of driving additional business to the studio. I emailed him the proposal and he agreed immediately.