Camp, finishing touches, and backup vocals

Aloha Universe!
My utmost apologies for not having posted in (can it be?) almost an entire month. I've been having adventure after adventure, with this summer careening by like a train... that... careens. Okay, so bad analogy, but this I've been up to a lot.

For starters, I went to a Village Harmony Teen Residential camp for the second year in a row. The camp consists of nine days of almost constant singing, including two concerts. By "almost constant" I mean that we rehearsed for seven to eight hours every day. I didn't calculate this year, but last year I found that we sang for an approximate fifty hours over the course of the week (excluding two two-and-a-half-hour concerts). Our group consisted of 25 teens under the age of 19, and we focused on two very different genres: Georgian (high energy music that is very different from western music) and Americana (folk and country). For a relatively small group, we had quite a powerful sound. The bass section, which mostly consisted of veteran VH singers, had a great sound. We were very synchronized and the timbres of our voices matched beautifully. In short, it was an intense experience, although for the most part it was incredibly fun as well.

Once I got back from camp, I came back to "It's Not You That I Want" with Clio. In the past couple weeks, we've cleaned most of it up and given it more "life". When recording in a studio with a few people, all playing different instruments at different times on different tracks, the biggest goal is to try to accurately play ones part. This can mean leaving out nuances and details, moments that make a song move. After coming back, we added some of these "moments" and changed some timing issues. Additionally, a tremolo string part was added by myself on the last verse to accentuate the stressfulness of the mood. If this is incomprehensible now, it should (hopefully) become clear once the song is out. We may release it for streaming next week or so!

In my last post I mentioned a friend, Will, doing a cover of Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams" that I was helping with. Last week, with the piano, bass, guitar, percussion, and lead vocals down, Will decided we would sing backup vocals. Although I had made some a capella songs on my own in garageband, I had never done it with Malcolm. I had also never done it with someone else. That was the really cool part. It sounded pretty bare at first. We laid down a track or two, and it wasn't much to hear. But after recording three harmony tracks each, it really started to sound like a choir. So exciting! The one point of frustration was when Will put down a very original, cool ending and I had to sing a weird harmony to it. My choral music training has kind of wired me to sing things a certain way, so that was incredibly hard. I spent a good fifteen minutes to a half hour trying to get it. In the end I managed to get something down, but it was quite a wake-up call to how closed-minded I am in some ways about music.

Thanks for reading and I hope summer's treating you like it should!