Behind the scenes: four days of live-recording
We’ve done it! Four days of live-recording in the beautiful surroundings of Kachtenhausen in northwestern Germany for our first CD. Each evening was attended by a full house of friends, musicians, artists and supporters. It was a very special experience for us to make music in this environment and certainly extraordinary for our audience who caught a glimpse of a recording session behind the scenes.
Here we’d like to share our experiences of these past days. Who knows, it might be interesting or inspirational for others taking on such projects.
Each day was a totally new experience and we were curious to see what kind of concert-atmosphere would develop each evening. We never got into any kind of routine. Each session was completely different, probably because our audience was a completely different group of people each evening.
We experienced many special moments; one evening focused more on our Brazilian repertoire, on another more on our groove-oriented music.
On average we played between 6 and 8 pieces per evening and focused on getting complete takes to use for the CD. Sometimes we repeated a piece when we felt that we could get a better version. This turned out to be very interesting for the audience, hearing what differences occurred during a second take.
We used the time in the mornings to listen to what we had recorded the night before and to decide on how we would proceed with the next session. Some single takes and loops were recorded in the afternoon before the audience arrived.
All in all it was four days full of wonderful musical experiences. And now its up to our sound engineer, Florian Bitzer to go to work on mixing and mastering the tracks. We are very much looking forward to hearing the end-result on CD and LP. In the coming weeks we will post again to give you an idea how things are going.
And, we have to express a huge thank-you to Arndt from Weinhof Kachtenhausen for the wonderful wine and to Ahmet from Café CUP in Detmold for the delicious quiche! Without these ingredients we would have never played as well as we did. ;-)
Shawn & the Wolf
Photos: Dirk Schelpmeier
