Weird & Wonderful takes shape

We held our third recording session for the new album last night, and the first where Annie was doing the singing.

We've had a bit of a hiatus since the second session what with one thing and another, but Annie's been busy in the interim with overdubbing, mixing, and adding various other new elements to the music to make it REALLY sing. Those first two tracks now sound awesome, although the first still needs me to fill in the final chorus, which we originally thought we could cheat on, but realised later that it's in a different key to the first.

With two tracks in the can, we had to decide whether to release these or wait until the whole album is finished. In the end we plumped for the more traditional approach, so apologies to anyone who was hoping for a sneak preview of the new stuff, but by way of sweetening the pill we've both been doing some work on our joint venture song-writing website, and you can now stream any/all of the tracks from our first album there if you fancy a listen, as well as accessing the lyrics and reading something about how I came up with the ideas for them.

Last night though, was all about Annie, and we'd chosen what turned out to be a particularly difficult track for her to start with. A real test of the vocal gymnastics, and after what I went through on our first recording, having not done any serious singing for quite a while, I really empathised with her struggles to find *exactly* the right note. We stuck at it though. There was an element of jokey rivalry to it, sure, revealed by her terse reply to my observation that it's not written down anywhere we have to finish a song every night: "You did." So we kept going. Us against the song. And we won.

Well, Annie did. I just ran the desk. Thankfully, it has a "simpleton mode." So rather than getting to grips with the one-hundred-and-fifty-million menus, sub-menus, sub-sub-menus, normalising, compressing, envelope shaping, pitch correction and all the other magnificent gubbins this software is capable of, all I had to do was hit "R" to start recording, and "space bar" to stop. Oh, and scroll backwards and forwards a bit. Simples!

Three down; nine to go. Still more production work for Annie to do on tonight's recording. Adding reverb, six-part harmonies, effects, maybe rerecording the odd bit of backing track or adding another guitar line. She puts hours of effort into the production of each track, but the end result is worth it. Not only is the original material much stronger on this second album - both musically and lyrically - but the things she's learned about production, along with her much greater proficiency with drums and guitar, is promising to make Weird & Wonderful live up to at least half its name!