January-February 2010 <i>ONU</i> Update

Working on the lead sheets for Helena's parts, i.e., composing lead vocals for a mute character. Sublime? Or just sheer lunacy? Time will tell.

Hello one and all,

With the business of the holidays past us, I have been making some incremental progress on ONU. I suppose when people read this they are confused as to how the timelines and priorities shift and change, but that’s the reality of this project. Sometimes I have to scrap old plans and do what is expedient.

On my last post, I had intended to simply go through the musical in more or less runtime order and write it straight through. After tracking with Becca before Christmas, however, I realized that it might be better to capture great performances while I have a window of opportunity to do so rather than just plow through as I had originally intended.

So here’s the new plan: For the rest of January I will be writing, arranging, transcribing lead sheets, and making VERY rough demos of just the songs that feature Helena. In early Feburary I intend to track Becca singing these parts, essentially recording all of her contributions to the project at one time. Obviously, this is not how albums are usually tracked. Lead vocals are usually the last thing recorded before mixdown, primarily so that the singer can really “get” the vibe of the song in its final form. Why do it this way?

Two reasons. First of all, Becca impressed me with her ability to thoroughly prepare her interpretation of her character’s vocal part: so much so, in fact, that I have no doubt that she can nail a very emotional performance with just the changes, lead melody and basic accompaniment. If anything, the rest of the instrumental performance might be influenced by her lines instead of vise-versa, and in musicals the force of the vocal should have a prominent position anyway. All I have to do is finalize tempo, time signatures, and key–any other arrangement considerations can be altered later.

The second reason is that the way this project has dragged at glacier speed, I can’t be sure Becca will even be around if I were to just go through writing chronologically, as I had intended to. She is actively seeking God’s direction for her giftings, and only God Himself knows where that might lead her. As she seems pretty in tune with this process, and very willing to obey direction once she perceives it, it only makes sense to capture her contribution while the opportunity exists.

This is not to say that she might not want a second chance at some of this once she hears her performances in their final musical contexts. If she is still around the area and motivated to retrack things, that would be fantastic, but if not, at least her initial tracking work would still be preserved. Does all that make sense?

In this brave new world of digital recording, workflow processes can be altered pretty easily. With a project like this, we have to maintain flexibility in our approaches in order to craft the best possible work with limited time and resources. Some of you might remember that we tracked Frank’s drums on Sorrow & Promise last instead of first, so doing things out of conventional order is more or less a defining characteristic of our work.

Prayers for my preparation for Becca’s February tracking would be much appreciated.