Preparing for the first session
I made another trip to Lexington to talk with Wil Freebody and Michael Thomas and flesh out the operational details of the upcoming venture. Wil wound up spending his morning with a potential student and his parents, so I talked with Michael Thomas, gave him a CD of seventeen songs I had recorded some four or five years earlier and indicated which ones would be the first to do. There were six ‘bluegrass-able’ songs and six more that were not. We decided that we would take on the bluegrass-able songs first, since I could play the acoustic guitar parts and had a pretty good idea of how I wanted them to sound.
We discussed the matter of session players: Michael T. indicated that there were several available through LIR who were very capable. I commented that I really only had one guy in mind to record - my banjo-picking buddy Kyle - who I thought would be up to session work, but that I also had a couple of other players I thought I could get to do some of the sessions if appropriate, including, with luck, Greg Martin of the Kentucky Headhunters. What a thought.
Michael T. said that he was more a pop-oriented guy than bluegrass, but I figured that what I know about bluegrass will offset that and some of the other tunes might well be pop-ish. In any case, part of this whole process is about getting production-quality demos to pitch as well as something to sell and/or give away.
After I got back to Louisville, I emailed Michael T. an MP3 of a practice session version of the first tune we planned to do. That session was recorded in August, 2005, with Michael P. the bass-player singing backup, on a 3/4″ Sony U-Matic videocassette deck, using a couple of pretty low-quality mics (an old Shure 57 and a Radio Shack PZM). Because the videocassette deck runs at 30 ips and uses 3/4 tape, the quality was nevertheless pretty good.
The tune is here: OnceInAWhileLove_duet.mp3 in case you’re interested.