Whew! Decided to add a joke track to the CD, so brought in four "best friends" to tell jokes and laugh. Quite a fun time, but a bit stressful for me and the engineer. Hopefully we got enough good stuff to get about a minute and a half track out of. And, had my own moments in the reording booth. Harmonies, which is fun, but Arthur and James were really picky. They actually wanted everything exactly on time and in pitch. I've done harmonies before, but this was as perfectionist as I've ever gotten. Some lines were a little (okay, a lot) harder to get right than others. But, the end result sounds awesome. Thank you James and Pro Tools!

The kids had a great day.. After their studio time, they hung around outside. Then I took them to Taco Bell (how do you spell ewe as in yucky?). They had lots of fun while I worked on filling out stuff so our accountant can finish our taxes. Then, we picked up roller blades and skooters, dropped one kid off at home, picked up one daughter and dropped her off at horseback riding, and headed back to the studio. The kids roller bladed, walked the dog, and made lots of noise (outside) while I did those awesome harmonies.

So, the fiddle player comes in tomorrow, and I'll have a rough mix on CD by next Wednesday. Them, Arthur's on tour, I return to life as usual, and we pick it up again in late April. Then it's four days of mixing, a day of mastering, and hopefully, by then, I'll be good to go with the graphics and we're off. Just a matter of figuring out how to pay the bills now. The hard part's done. Now I just need to figure out how to quadruple my income for the next few months. Ha ha.

Can't wait until Wednesday to hear what we've got. Should be pretty good mixes. James has done most of the editing as we went, so we're in good shape with the cutting and pasting (Pro Tools magic). Hoping to use some of the mixes for submissions for song contests and other stuff coming due soon.

Adios. Tomorrow I'm doing a short program at the Boulder Cesar Chavez remembrance. Wrote a song tonight, but not sure I'll sing it tomorrow. I'll try it out on Jamie and see what she thinks of it. She's 13, so I'll get an honest vocal opinion.

Best Friends CD - Update One

Vocals have been recorded for all songs. Vocal edits will be done on Friday. Kids came into the studio on Saturday. That was a zoo, but fun and the kids were great. They added vocals and sound effects to about 7 or 8 songs. Six kids - 4 girls, 2 boys. We'll probably double their good tracks. On Friday Becky and her best friend Katie will add some talking stuff to "In trhe Middle" and do a bunch of jokes. We're hoping to have a joke track. The one on "Boo, Cackle, Trick or Treat" is so much fun (people actually download it from iTunes!) we decided if the CD is entitled "Best Friends" then we should have something best friends do a lot - joke around and laugh! So, I hope Friday is fun. It's a touchy process - big sister is jealous that younger sister will be on more songs/tracks. But big sister and her friends don't have the timing and giggles that younger sis and her bff do. Oh, well. One more thing for me to deal with.

After Friday, we'll do a rough mix which I hope to get out to some teachers and librarians for quotes I can use on the CD packaging, my website, and other marketing. And, in the middle of all of this I'm trying to finish getting everything together to do our taxes. Accountant meeting is tomorrow AM. So, enough for now. I'm hoping to get better at updating the blog. Maybe even daily.

CD Progress

Working on a new CD. Title will be "Best Friends" and it will have 13 originals, two traditional songs that I wrote new verses for, and one of my favorite folk standards, Stewball. More later.