"Home Work"

I produced my first worship record this last fall for a leader named Neal Mabry. Neal is the youth worship leader at Fellowship Bible Church in The Woodlands. I think the church actually calls itself something else, but that's how I know it. Anyways - it turned out great and I am really proud of it. Neal myself and a couple of other guys worked really hard on it. We also had the help of some great musicians from Nashville and Houston.

Producing for me was a lot of work. Producers look at every aspect of the song: From the melody, lyrics, arrangement, tempo and key to the instrumentation. Working out of my house was great, but also hard to be disciplined enough to work in the morning and be done when Linz got home. Here's a pic of my studio below.

Working on so many aspects of the songs I ended up co-writing with Neal and a friend of ours who also recorded the bulk of the guitars on the record (Andy Watson) quite a bit. It was a ton of fun and very fulfilling. So on top of working on all the songs independently, demoing them, re-working and re-writing certain parts - I then had to record them. We started at Red Tree Studios in Magnolia with my friend Harold Rubens (Audio Engineer for Robbie Seay and Caedmon's Call) who engineered drums for me as I tracked drums first. Below is a video of the session.

We recorded the EP in stages. There are different ways to record a song/record: you can either put a lot of guys in the same studio and record at the same time or you can do things one at a time which is called "overdubbing". Overdubbing means that an artist or musician can lay down scratch material (some kind of instrumentation that will later be deleted in order to form a road map or guide for the song) with a click track (a metronome that is digitally played alongside the musician who is recording to ensure that the tempo stays the same). Drums and Bass usually go first in order to lay the foundation of the song and the dynamics.

I met a bass player and keys player in Nashville when I was recording drums for Jackie Key's record which will be released this year. It will be great. I asked those two guys to record on Neal's project. It was a lot of fun. Tony Lucdio played bass and Cason Cooley played keys. Tony has played on just about every Christian record you have ever heard and so has Cason. Cason also started the band "The Normals" with Andy Osegna.

Anyways. If you would like to check out some mp3's of Neals EP go to www.myspace.com/nealmabry

It should be on itunes in a month or so.

J