Celtic Flavor, Modern Flair

Most of my recorded music is created by looping. Just in case you don’t know, “looping” is the practice of recording a portion of a song and reusing it multiple times to build the composition. My wife, upon discovering this sleight-of-guitar, declared “You’re cheating!” and left me to pave the road to my own damnation without her.

My recording booth is in my studio…my studio is in my office…my office is in my living room: if you follow the logic carefully, you’ll see that I’m doing my recording in my living room. With two children under the age of ten, in our 1400 square foot house, this is a  huge challenge: sound carries, and the living room is the pathway from the family room to the bathroom.

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Don’t let anyone tell you different: with care, you can record your music without paying money to a studio. This isn’t to say that you should, only that you can, though that line of thinking is a post all by itself.

For my part, I’m recording the cd in my basement. I have good quality mics (as detailed in an earlier post); a reasonably powerful computer; good software; a comfortable space in which to work; and friends with experience willing to help me create the best product possible.

I like my house. It is the only house I can remember living in. It’s about ninety years old, subject to all the aches and pains that such a house is heir to, though for the purposes of this post the one I’m most concerned with is squeaky floors.

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I’m working on a CD, tentatively titled “Walking There”, scheduled for a June/July release. If you’d like to be notified when it becomes available, please sign up for my mailing list by clicking on Contact William in the menu, above.

I’ve finally got Jamie Raeburn to a point where there’s a few places that can use some touch-up, but overall it’s good and if push came to shove I could release it as is. I’m going to try to have Brett Gibson come and lay down an accordion track for it.

Next step is sometime in the next week or so to build a portable sound booth. The floors in our eighty year old house are just too damn noisy! I hung some acoustic foam behind my microphones (amazing what you can do with a queen-size, $10 Craig’s List egg crate mattress pad) and even that small – admittedly jerry-rigged – touch made a difference.

A bit over fifteen years ago, I had it in my head that I was going to have a music career. (It’s not that I was wrong; I was just ahead of my time.) I took my girlfriend – who I would later make my wife – to a place in North Kansas City officially called St. Mary’s School Of Music. It had another name I can’t remember that was far, far cooler than that. They’d set up shop in an old grocery store off of Armour Rd. and sold everything musical.

I was there to purchase a MIDI workstation, which I still have: a Roland XP80. 512 on-board sounds (of which I’ve only ever used about 10), 64 note polyphony, weighted keys…not the best money could buy, but still, $2500 back in 1990 was nothing to sneeze at, and bought quite a lot of keyboard.

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I got together with my friends Kent and Kevin – who have been helping me with my CD – and we made a music video. Before I give you the link, though, let me offer a little bit of history.

At the end of the video, there is the inscription, “To Lezlie.” Of course, there isn’t a lot of room to expound at the end of a YouTube video, so I’ll do it here.

The “Lezlie” in question is a dear friend of mine. We met – really met, as opposed to just being acquaintances at a renaissance festival – on the set of an independent film we were both cast in. We share a love of music and on the set one day (while we were waiting for the director to get his act together) we brought out our guitars and traded songs. It became an impromptu concert that lasted nearly two hours (we have it on DVD!) . The song on the video, “Jamie Raeburn”, was one of the first songs I played, and is one that I am most proud of.

In the summer of 2007, Lezlie moved very far away. She, like so many others, traveled to find her answers, and in the meantime here’s a video…a sort of “Ok, now it’s YOUR turn” message. We still keep in mostly regular touch, and the next time she’s in town we’re going to try to record a CD’s worth of music – and maybe some video while we’re at it.