Then, only a few weeks back, I met New York musician Mike Caro through the Just Plain Folks music community. Long story short, we worked out a little deal whereby Mike would record some live drums (and bass) in his studio for me. Originally this was just going to be a few tracks, but after pitting the drums he recorded for Before You Cast Me Aside against some of the midi stuff I had lined up for the other songs on the album, I realized that would be a mistake. Mike adds something to the mix that my canned drummer will never possess: life! Why reserve that for only a few of the songs on the album?

The no brainer part of the decision was asking Mike to play on all the songs that still need drums. The harder part was how to make this work within the confines of my record one-song-a-month plan. With the extra stuff that needs to happen on both ends of the Atlantic, there was just no way for me to finish Tonight with live drums before August 22.

But! The drums for Before You Cast Me Aside are already done! Why don’t I just swap those two songs around? Then everything just magically works out.

So it shall be!

I did remember to upload the final version of Secret Love before calling it a night. Patrons, get it here!
No patron yet? Sign up here!

The final master for Secret Love came in on Friday! It just blows me away. Patron download will be up shortly. I’m also happy to report that Sound Vision Studio will handle the final mastering of the entire album once it is finished.

Next up in the project is Tonight. I recorded Pepijn on bass yesterday and I will be spending the rest of the week polishing the core drum and bass tracks, before Ruben comes in once again to add his guitar magic next week.

Meanwhile, the project has turned international with the addition of New York musician and newfound friend Mike Caro of SubStudio, whom -as we speak- is putting the final touches on the drum track for October’s song Before You Cast Me Aside, which will also feature Martijn ‘Marty’ Korteknie on double bass. Marty played most of the bass tracks on my last full album, Life Baggage and it’s great to have him back as a special guest on this next one.

Finally, I’m sheduled to perform live on the radio show Joosten In Het Weekend in October and will probably be at the new Hellpop festival at the end of the month.

Exciting times indeed!

The Most Important Ritual

Arriving in Arnhem right on time (how very un-musician-y of us), we are met by studio owner George Konings. The man has the calm demeanor of a brain surgeon who would operate with a steady hand, even while the building around him is being ripped apart by a tornado. After our hello’s, he takes us into the studio café for that most important of morning rituals: coffee. I gave up drinking the stuff some time ago, but my childlike the-night-before-Sinterklaas* anticipation has robbed me of a good deal of the previous night’s sleep. I say that calls for an exception - I need the boost.
*Saint Nicolas… short explanation: the Dutch version of Christmas

Everything’s Bigger Here

After coffee, we are taken into the main recording room, which is apparently big enough to fit 90 people. Today it will just be me. Me… and a ginormous piano (a Yamaha C7, 2.23 meters long). Goerge has already set up the piano with four mics - one at the tail end for the basses, two different mics near the front for the high notes (to keep our options open) and another one further away to capture the ambient piano sound. Last thing to do is to prep a mic to record my vocals with. We go with an AKG SolidTube, which is the big, nay, massive brother of the mics I use at home. It’s actually a bit intimidating to face a microphone that is the size of your head!

Me behind the piano. Note the head-sized microphone.

Crawling Deeper And Deeper

After a brief sound check, George gives me the go ahead for the first take. “This is the easy part”, is the blatant lie I tell myself before I start playing. I manage to get most of the way through that first take before I once again realize that recording stuff is actually the hardest part of what I do. Fortunately, after every take there is that calm voice on the head phones telling me to push a little here, give a little there and helps me crawl deeper and deeper into the feel of the song. In my mind, we did forty takes, but I believe the actual number was more like ten or twelve (I didn’t have the heart to ask).

The Perfect Take

At around lunch time (assuming you are the kind of person who has lunch at one), my part of the job is basically over. Now it is up to George to take the best of everything we’ve recorded and make one ‘perfect’ take out of it. The one I would have played if I was some infallible super-human instead of the mere mortal singer you all know and love. I wouldn’t dare cutting together what are basically five different live performances with no reference whatsoever, but our man pulls it off in no time. Then it is break time, because our producer needs to clear his head.

The Dolby Machine

After the break, we get to the mix. My voice is pulled first through an analog compressor that is ten years older than me (meaning it was built in ‘68) and then through what George calls The Dolby. I still haven’t figured out what the thing does exactly, other than that my voice sounds a lot sweeter after. Each and every new machine comes with a story just long enough to pass the time we have to wait for recording the analog effects. There’s certainly a lot of toys in this store! The coolest has to be the real plate reverbs we end up using on the piano. Step by step, we hear the song grow until, at around five, the mix is done. Time to head home.

Is that really me I’m hearing?

The story hasn’t finished yet. I have some time to give feedback on the mix, before George will send me the final master. Once the master is in, patrons will be able to download the finished song and I will probably also release this as a single… until that time, you can check out the pre-master mix here.

Ubisoft ran into such a glitch with the CD-check built into the PC version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2; users who downloaded the game from an official source didn’t have a disc to pass the check, causing a new patch to break legally downloaded versions of the game. Ubisoft had a novel—not to mention cheap—way to to fix this: a crack that allows the game to play without a disc in the drive. The issue? The crack came from the “warez” group Reloaded, with no attribution or notice that third-party code was used to fix the DRM issue.

How ridiculous is that? A publisher is now sending out cracks to circumvent it’s own DRM! (Not to mention doing so, without informing the crack authors) What’s next? ABC advertising illegal torrents of the next Lost episode on their homepage?

DRM… just don’t!

The solo we’ll be looking at Today is from my song Secret Love, which I’ll be recording later this month. It follows after the second chorus and it’s purpose is to build up tension before the climactic final chorus. Here is the first version I wrote to do this:

Download audio file (secret-love-solo-1.mp3)


The overall feel of this first version is quite good already, but it is not as effective as it could be. You’ll notice that most of the solo is in the lower registers of the piano, where I also play most of the notes that accompany my singing in the rest of the song. This is convenient, because my hands don’t have to move, but it also creates problems:

1. The start of the solo doesn’t really stand out from what came before, because it is in the same register.
2. In addition, the solo lacks dynamics - everything is loud and bombastic.

Let’s hear what happens when I move the start of the solo to a higher register:

Download audio file (secret-love-solo-2.mp3)

This is better, but we’re still back to those lower registers pretty quickly. To maximize the impact of the basses and the rising chords at the end of the solo, I should try to linger a bit longer in those higher registers. But I can’t linger too long, or I won’t have time to get back down:

Download audio file (secret-love-solo-3.mp3)

Staying up top too long, we loose much of the “oomph” of the solo and we can’t have that, of course. The challenge, then, becomes to rewrite the “ta-da-dam” melody so that the second round travels down two octaves and lands in the lower registers just in time for the last part of the solo. Let’s also throw in a few unexpected harmonies to spice things up a bit further. Here is the final version:

Download audio file (secret-love-solo-4.mp3)

Well, there you have it: the refined solo for Secret Love. I hope you’ll agree that this last version is more dynamic and more interesting to listen to then the first. Now all that is left for me to do is to rehearse this thing about a hundred times before I head into the studio on July 26.

A big part of the problem stems from the fact that I’ve severely underestimated the number of shots I needed to keep the video interesting. I figured I could get away with two shots per section of the song, which would equate to roughly fourteen shots in total. However, once I got to work I found out that I needed many more shots to tell the story and keep up with the flow of the song - the first chorus alone needed eight shots. The total shot count was closer to fifty.

Each new shot requires drawing a new back background. I need about four hours to draw one of those backgrounds, thus drawing fifty backgrounds would take me roughly 200 hours. That’s more time than I spent recording More last month and I spent all my spare time recording! Houston, we have a time management problem.

Clearly, I cannot make the video and still stay on course with my song a month recording plan as well. I’m hoping I can find someone who is more skilled at drawing and animating (with Flash) than me and who is, more importantly, willing and able to finish the video. Barring that, I can always revive the animated video project once the album is finish.

For now, I gotta to stick to the plan and make these eleven songs happen!