datamusicata

Cliff Eberhardt (www.cliffeberhardt.com) flew into Los Angeles last night and today we went back to work on All Wood and Doors.

As he lives in Massachusetts and I live in California, we can only record when our schedules mutually permit it to happen, so in between our last sessions in May, I hired Scott Breadman (www.scottbreadman.com) for some basic percussion and Chad Watson (www.chadwatson.com) to play bass, so we now had some solid basic tracks to work with.  

As this is all Doors (www.thedoors.com)  songs, we’ve gotten the support of John Densmore, the original drummer in the Doors, who has graciously agreed to come in and play percussion on the songs as well.    To say we are excited out of our minds would be an understatement.  Now back to today.

The first thing I did was to play Cliff all the tracks that I had recorded so far and then to discuss one song, “The End”  which we had decided to do as a Gregorian chant sort of thing.

I worked on it by myself and didn’t come up with anything that I liked, so I picked up my guitar and started playing an ostinato that seemed to serve the tune. 

I then played a little call and response with two other guitars and sang some rough ideas.    Then I decided to put it away until Cliff could come out and we could work on it together.

As that was the least formed and the one that needed the most work, we decided to work on that one first.

We listened and then decided to try cutting and pasting what I had done until we had some sort of cohesive basic track to which we would overdub vocals.

We figured out where we wanted the vocals to fall and then recorded them for real.   Then we layed down some very close vocal harmonies over what we had already recorded and gave it another listen.

Suddenly there was form in the void and momentum and the implication of destination.

Now the song by the Doors is eleven minutes long.    Ours comes in at two minutes and thirty seconds.   We only took the lyrics we thought we do justice to and Cliff added the icing on the cake by playing some wonderfully evocative slide guitar on his Granata Dobro (www.granataguitars.com).

We liked the track so much, we decided to not add anything else to it, though I would be interested to hear if John D hears anything for it. 

In any event, we have completed one track for the CD, All Wood and Doors, the song we plan to end the CD with, “The End.”  

More on our project on Monday.