Just a short studio day, because Dave and I don’t have any long days in common in the near future. We’re doing final details, and are really close to finishing with all the recording. There was some possibility that we could have tried to finish everything today, but I’m glad we didn’t – because we weren’t trying to be efficient we could explore options and work until we got things the way we wanted them. We started off reassembling The Best Art from the tracks Pete Kennedy recorded. Which are beautiful, but the version of the guitar track Pete sent along with me wasn’t recorded right so it sounded fuzzy. We were pretty sure the original was done right because a) Pete’s good at this sort of thing, so he would have checked, and b) the rough mix he sent sounded fine. So Dave emailed Pete, who will send a different version. We then added electric bass, and decided it didn’t need anything else. We also added bass (upright) to Resolution , after debating whether it needs it or not. (And even now we’re not entirely certain where it will come in.) More importantly, we first re-recorded the last two vocal lines. It’s at the bottom of my range and my voice was tired by the time we got there, so it sounded like I could barely sing the notes (probably because I could barely sing the notes). And we ended up working with the wrong vocal track to the song, which completely distracted me when we were recording bass (and I was engineering, so I should have been paying attention to the bass!). Because I’ve been listening to the rough mixes almost constantly, I know what my vocal on that song sounds like. And this vocal didn’t sound like that. The big tip-off was how I pronounced consonants. In the first verse, for instance, there’s the line “Not Because I Want To.” And the way you’d normally say something like that in conversation is “not because I wan to” (essentially only pronouncing that “t” once). But in the recorded version we were using, it very carefully (and ridiculously) pronounced both “t” sounds. And there were similar weird enunciation things, and the connection we had to stitch after the bridge (where the timing stops) didn’t sound right. Turns out we’d been, just today, working with the vocal track I recorded in 2007 for the first CD (and that never made it onto the CD). Which isn’t as crazy as it sounds, given that we’re actually using the guitar track from that recording. And bits were in different places because we recorded Jim’s mandolin during the time when Dave’s computer wasn’t working, so files were all over the place. Anyway, I’m glad I noticed, because it would have been really confusing to suddenly have the wrong vocal track in the song. The other big vocal thing I wanted to fix was the first couple lines of Fun Will Find A Way. That’s a song that has gotten a strong positive reaction from people who have heard it, and I think it’s a well-written song. And it was the one song in the rough mixes that I was hating, so I tried to figure out why. It turns out that I really didn’t like the way I sang the first stanza. So we re-recorded it (I must have sung “South Side of Chicago” fifteen times in an effort to get a good take – it’s a surpringly hard set of words to pronounce well, and, true to form, I start the song with strange intervals and off in one corner of my vocal range) and it’s much better now. And while we were at it, we fixed a few other bits of vocal weirdness in that song. And then there was the percussion choice. We’d originally recorded shaker on the song. My spouse didn’t like how it sounded, and I understood the objections. So Dave and I went back to our hunt around the studio for things to hit and shake. We tried – hard to believe – a cowbell (and searched until we found the right sort of mallet to hit it with). On the one hand, it had a nice sound, but after we recorded it Dave declared that it sounded like water dripping. We then tried a brush doing a slow loop on a snare drum, which sounded so weird (it reminded me of the noise of shoveling slush in the winter) that I almost stopped the recording halfway through. So we nixed that one too. But we still wanted some kind of percussion to help move the song along. After experimenting with hitting a few more things and being unsatisfied, Dave suggested the pant-leg slaps that are also the underlying rhythm in Many Paths. So I went and recorded those. (Actually had to do two takes; it’s mind-numbingly dull to slap a rhythm on your leg for four minutes – I would never make it as a percussion player – and things started falling apart at the end, so I needed to re-record that bit.) I’ll listen to the track today and see how it sounds. The final thing we did was do a bit of fiddle choosing from the Fiddle Player recordings; we hadn’t fully chosen from the various tracks Tracy recorded, so we picked ones that were most in tune and worked most with the feel we wanted. (Didn’t actually end up changing much from whichever take we were working with, though.) Tomorrow will really be the final final recording session, unless something else comes up (on the last CD I wrote How I Got To Jackson after we'd finished recording all the tracks, and Maura Kennedy, after hearing it, declared that it had to be on the CD. Which is why Resolution got dumped from the previous CD). Looking forward to moving to the next stages, but I’ll miss the conceptualization and recording. Better start writing the songs for CD #3!