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Oh Dear, What Can The Matter Be?…
Written by Charlotte
Oh dear God, my first recording crisis!…
For the last two Saturdays I’ve been in the Abubilla studio, recording songs. Abubilla is this pretty neat music academy I’m part of where we get to record tracks with a band and eat pizza for lunch, and the best part is it’s free. I feel very lucky whenever I’m there. I feel like there must be some catch, or that at any minute, I’ll wake up from this lovely dream, after all, it’s not often a relatively new singer finds herself in a top-class recording studio with seriously talented musicians all eagerly jamming away to her vocals. However, as luck would have it, the stars seem to have been somewhat aligned with my musical path since I started on it back in January, so I made the very conscious (and no doubt very wise) decision not to ask too many questions in case I balls it all up.
Anyway, ironically, during this Saturday’s studio session, I encountered my first singing hurdle; I was attempting to sing a fairly tricky song and could not, for life in me, get the timing of it right. In some parts I sounded like I was being strangled I was gasping for breath so much, and in others it seemed like someone had pressed the ‘fast forward’ button I was singing so quickly, purely to try and get the lyrics to fit with the music. I suddenly realised how hard singing is and after three hours of trying and not getting anywhere, I felt like I wanted to run away and become a recluse… over-dramatic? moi?
Jimmy, the academy founder, who is very kind and patient (thank God) seemed to think my poor attempts were quite endearing and gave me continuous words of support and encouragement. Rather embarrassingly, at one point, Ed, a guitarist had to stand in front of me and conduct me with a pencil to try and get me into the beat, and Martyn one of the other guitarists took me through the songs line for line so I could get the hang of things. It all helped and gave me a wonderful, heart-warming sense of camaraderie, but by lunch time, the bare fact still remained that my vocals sounded uncannily like those of phoebe’s from Friends.
We took a break for lunch and after rather too much pizza on my part, I decided enough was enough and I was going to ‘nail’ the song if it was the last thing I did. By 4pm, we finally had a rough version of the track where I’d got the timing right, all that was missing was the emotion. We tried again, this time with me attempting to put real meaning into what I was singing. But alas! It was too much, my brain simply could not get me to sing in time AND put feeling into it, just like it can’t get my hand to rub my stomach and pat my head at the same time either.
And so it turns out that I will, in fact, be back in the studio in two weeks time re-doing the whole song. But in the meantime, I will of course be practising the song to death on my own… hmmm, either that or going into hiding!