More fun in The Congress House music studio

A few weeks ago I shared a piece called . This is a quick follow up to that with a brief insight into what goes on in the process of making a record.

For folks that have never been in a music studio, all of this may seem a bit tedious and slow, but this is what it takes to build a good radio ready finished product. There is a lot of banter between the crew and the artist, and a lot of takes. These days it's all done digitally, but we still make jokes about running out of tape. The reality is that on occasion we run out of drive space and have to move material around.

Here's my record producer, Mark Hallman, hard at work; plugging my music on social media. Well, that's what he said.

Here are a few tools of the trade. Each one has a specific purpose, or so I'm learning. The little guy down at the bottom is a bass ukulele. It sounds almost exactly like an upright bass fiddle. It's fret-less, and the strings are like thick rubber bands.

What you see above is what I call the birds nest. It's really a rack of what is called "Patch Bays" in the music business. Only the "Chief", Andre Moran (studio engineer) is genius enough to figure this mess out, but it routes signals all over the sound room to various pieces of equipment in "The Rack".

Here are some more of the tools that are used in the studio. There is a real smorgasbord to choose from and I've only shown a few. Mark considers the entire music studio as an instrument in and of itself.

This wall in the kitchen area of the studio is dedicated to the display of a small sampling of the records that have been produced there. I'm pretty sure that it's not complete because there are a couple of piles of them below this rack that aren't on display. I heard a rumor when I was there this month that the assistant engineer (John Pearson) was working on expanding this display.

The following clips have overdub material that we have been working on during the past few sessions over the past couple of months:

This clip recorded in early July of 2017, contains vocal overdubs were done in early July at The Congress House Studio in south Austin with Andre Moran at the controls as chief Engineer. Mark Hallman, my producer, is singing backup vocals. The subject song lyrical material for the piece that I call "Heartland" came as a result of work that I had been doing in Indiana for a railroad capacity expansion project in the late 00's.

The clip above is part two of the first clip.

This clip above was taken in early August of 2017 . The song "Songsmiths and Poets" was written as a tribute to all the artists that pour their hearts and souls into the songwriting process, with little to no reward for it. Again, Mark Hallman doing backup vocals and Andre Moran "The Chief" at the controls.

I had several other clips that I wanted to share that I took that day but I was having trouble with the camera's video recording feature and a couple of clips never got saved. Not to worry, I'll be taking more to post later.

Thanks for following me on this feed and stay tuned for more to come.