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July 28th 2004
I am sitting here in the control room,
at the mixer, in my little "office" area and the musicians
are arriving and this is all very exciting. I LOVE the sound of
strings (we are doing the wind instruments tomorrow) and three of
the arrangements are completely new to me so I am anxious to hear
them… gotta go for now, but I'll be back!
So…… "real time" reporting now… we're putting
strings (6 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos) on "Free Me" and
it's really sounding cool… "Free Me" like you never
heard it before and it's so fascinating to me how an arranger "sees"
and interprets the music. Adding strings also changes the mood in
certain places and I can see that I may have to re-do some parts
of the verse vocals but that's okay too, I want it all to "fit"
as perfectly as possible. I've worked with Mikhail (the arranger)
before and one of the things I like about his work is that he adds
subtle variations to the basic chords which really add "mystery",
a quality I love. Mind you, it doesn't always work so we
have to be careful!!
As an example, it didn't work in a couple of places in "The
Wizard" (the Bm in the bridges for you musicians out there)
but we soon corrected that and now it sounds fabulous!!
Next is "July Morning"… stand by… I remember
this arrangement from the concert in Moscow last year so I can't
wait to record it, but I have to, because it's break time and the
violas are having a cigarette with one of the cellos!!
Of course I changed the ending of "July Morning" so it
actually ends just like the live version and not like the original
from which the arrangement was written so we had to do some re-writing
"on the fly" and this made for some interesting animation
in the control room between myself, Mikhail, Anton (conductor) and
Sasha. Poor Egor (translator) was working overtime!! But it still
amazes me how fast musicians of this calibre adjust… I suppose
it's all about discipline, training and experience and I only have
one of those! And in the end… well, you'll just have to buy
it!! :-)
The live version of "Lady in Black" (which is the basis
for this recording) is also completely different and the arrangement
had to be almost totally re-written but that worked out well too
and then, finally, we recorded "Rain". I asked Vadim to
play piano on this because he adds such a totally different and
wonderful dimension to the song. Of course when I play it there
is a different dimension too but Vadim's is a good one. I am afraid
that my fat fingers still haven't got to grips with the piano very
well! But I am working on it. The orchestration for "Rain"
calls for simple parts played with passion and expression and they
definitely accomplished that… so much so that I am really looking
forward to singing it tomorrow.
So…… the String players have gone home now and we are
going to the shop to record Vadim on the Petrof grand… more
in a little bit!
I'm back! After we managed to get silence in the music shop (it
was supposed to be closed!) we recorded three takes of the grand
piano and to be honest it's going to be hard to pick one. Vadim
is such a creative player that he just wants to keep playing and
he keeps coming up with more and more great stuff.
I want this recording of "Rain" to be a tribute to David
so I'll let you be the judge of whether or not we did the song and
David's memory justice……
Now it's time to wrap up after a long but enjoyable day. I am looking
forward to tomorrow!
Next
day...
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