Monday, October 5, 2015

A Look at Our Sessions

We finished our recording sessions on the weekend of my Songs From the Poets, a set of twelve songs I wrote a few years ago, but have been waiting to get a good recording of. Now we have a couple of days of editing and fine-tuning to do in order to get to the final version. All together, to record the twelve songs, it took about twelve hours of studio time. A lot of that was spent on working out placement of the microphones and musicians and even more on editing together different takes. Some songs were recorded in one or two takes.

Here are a few photos from the sessions to whet your appetite for the music. The singer is Hannah Pagenkopf from Calgary, Alberta. The recording engineer is Ken Basman from Toronto, Ontario and I was born in Alberta, lived a long time on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and quite a while in Montreal, Quebec. Both Ken and I have lived in Mexico for quite a while as well.

You can see larger versions of all the photos by clicking on them.

The studio

Soprano extraordinaire, Hannah Pagenkopf

Hard-working guitarist, me
Not a lot of shots of Ken Basman, but here he is with Hannah in the control room

Listening to some takes

It's an all-Canadian effort as even my guitar was built by a Canadian builder, Vancouver's Robert Holroyd.

So there you have it! As a little musical envoi, here is a performance of me playing one of the favorite pieces of guitar music, Asturias (Leyenda) by Isaac Albéniz:



4 comments:

Marc in Eugene said...

So glad that Songs has been successfully recorded! and thanks for the photographs. Hope there was a good audience for Hannah P.'s recital on the 22nd.

Bryan Townsend said...

Yes, pretty good audience for this time of year. We might do something in the winter if the stars align themselves.

Christine Lacroix said...

Lovely photos Bryan. Thanks for revealing yourself!

Bryan Townsend said...

8^)