How do you record over 100 songs to send to your group for reference? That’s the question I needed help answering so I started looking around for a studio that could help me solve it. I knew the engineers that I had used to this point, wouldn't have had enough time for what I needed to get done.
I looked around and was able to connect with an experienced audio engineer named Warren Ross who had a home studio with great gear and said he'd take my project on. He is an engineer and producer who had developed his skills working with producer Jack Richardson.
Now that I had found a place to record, the goal was simple; Choose 100 songs out of the 500 in my repertoire and record them all so that the other musicians I had recently began working with could learn the key and tempo for their practice sessions. Simple right? I was excited about the players I had started working with like Todd Richmond but the challenge was that I needed to bring them up to speed with how I did the songs for our sets. They are all well known songs that I had been performing by myself for several years, but each had a unique key and style so I needed a way for players to have my part to be able to create their’s. This is where recording in Warren’s studio helped a lot so that I could play my part for each song one after the other so that I could send those tracks to the team.
I ended up choosing 125 records such as, “Across the Universe”, “Landslide” and “Wind Cries Mary”. Warren set up the click track for each track as I played back to back for 3 hours straight on all the tunes in one take. We did 6 sessions of that process during the weekdays since I was doing appearances on the weekend. My hands went through the wringer having to play the studio sessions, weekend gigs, and practicing other times during the week. After the 6 sessions I was able to accumulate 125 rough recordings so I had what players needed to practice parts against.
Working with Warren laid the foundational tracks I used in the raw Soul Stingers cover recordings we finished recording in 2022. Also the original guitar tracks for the reproduced "Northern Lights" cut, was in this batch of recordings. I later recorded Northern Lights vocals there as well.
Then in 2023 when I was re-recording “Make A Memory”, I was able to bring Tendo Gloria to Warren’s studio for the updated vocal feature. She loved working there especially with the iconic Aretha Franklin canvas Warren has on the wall.
Having a comfortable place available to do these recordings was great and I want to thank Warren for his to help with these projects.
To see what Warren is working on here!
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