The recording process

Hi!

Some people have told us they want to know a little more about the recording process and the making of the songs on "The Mission Field". I have written a few of the songs, and I can tell you a little bit about the process. Most of my songs start with some kind of drum or bass groove, but others start with a vocal phrase or an idea about the lyrics. Then I'll do some kind of demo version of the song. Sometimes I get one or two of the singers to record demo vocals so that the rest of the singers and musicians have something to listen to when learning the song. I often change my songs a few times, which can be a bit confusing for the singers.. :-) The most tricky part is the lyrics. I have a message about Jesus that I want to share, but I also want it to sound good. And it's hard, because English ain't my fist language.

On Joakim's songs, he often gives me some kind of demo recording, and then I'll start from that. I often try to find out what can be done with the arrangement. Sometimes it's already perfect, but sometimes I or someone else get a new idea about the sound or the rhythmic arrangement, and we'll start working from that. We all like to try all kinds of crazy ideas and grooves. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's worthless. But you'll never know until you've tried. And it's hard, because we want a lot of different people to like the CD, which means we can't just do one kind of songs or one kind of style.

When it comes to the recording process, this CD is quite different from our last CD from 2006, "Whole". When we recorded Whole, we were in a huge studio for two weeks, day and night. And we recorded most of the instruments together at once. Then the whole choir came to the studio and recorded the vocals together. This upcoming CD is totally different. We have chosen to do it in another way. Last week we recorded the drums, as you know. That was the first real recording in this project. Before that we only had programmed demo drums and other demo instruments. The next step will be to start recording bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals (which already is in progress..) and lots of other things like strings, horns, loops, sound effects and speech. As I mentioned before, we decided not to record the singers all at once. We wanted to use better mics than on the "Whole" CD, which led us to tracking sopranos, altos and tenors separately. I think the sound on this upcoming CD is going to be nice.

The final step will be mixing and mastering the CD. There are lots of other aspects of this project that I could mention, but I think this is about it for now. God bless you!

/Tobias