Most of the intruments I use are close by. These little 'bead drums' are being featured on the new CD.

9:45am on Thursday, July 4, 2009 (LOL, oops, I mean July 2)

Life in a Cave! Perfect for a Caveman Quilter - only now I'm in a music cave. I'm not hiding, I'm not sick, I'm just working on getting my new Christmas CD ready for the recording sessions in August in Nashville, TN. I've been in my recording studio for about 14 hours for the last three days. The basic arrangements are all done - not a problem there, but every track has to be bounced individually to a single audio file (each song might have 30-50 of these), and then all the orchestrations have to be written so the players will have music on their stands when we record them on Aug 5-8. Oh, and did I say that there are plenty of other must-do things between now and then?

For the next 12 days at least, I'll be focusing on nothing but this.

Right now I'm working on getting my solo vocal just right for the first verse of All Is Well. I dont' really like to sing (there are plenty of way better singers out there), but in this case I must. When something like this will be permanent FOREVER, you just spend a lot of time on things like: Is the 't' too hard. Is there too much fffff when I start the word "for". Of course, am I on pitch? But also, is it too smooth, too oversung, too weak? These are the things a producer considers. I can do 50 takes of one sentence looking for the one that will be 'the one'.

I'll let you know how it turns out. I'm watching the clock - tick, tock, tick, tock.