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

Vocal recording

Yesterday we recorded the first vocal parts for the CD. First out were Maria, Sara and Felicia. We wanted to record five songs on one night, but we only did three until we were to tired to continue. This is going to take a lot of time, but it's worth every minute. We had a lot of fun though. Check out this video.. :-)



The next recording session will be on Monday night. Until then I'll keep on editing the drum tracks. Right now I've done five songs out of sixteen. On some of the songs I've tried different drum sounds by overdubbing the acoustic drums with other samples. I'll do my best to find some nice sounds for your ears. I hope you'll like it...

Blessings!

Vocals

Today we start recording choir parts for "the Mission Field". I can't believe that we actually seem to be on schedule still. Since we live in different cities and everyone is involved in so many different musical projects it seemed like a too crazy adventure to get this CD done this spring. But so far we're on track. One thing to work on right now is the decision of how many songs to put on the CD. Five songs? Or twenty-five songs? Or something in between?

A quite nice way to rehearse

This past weekend we had rehearsals both saturday and sunday. And we couldn´t be where we usually are so we had to find an other solution. We ended up in Kristians 3 room apartment. I thought it would be hard to sit back in a sofa and sing the high tenor notes but it was really nice. We had a nice relaxed time and we did get a lot of work done. And Kristian was a really good host serving us coffee and "vaniljlängd". Just hope he won´t be evicted from all the noise. The next day we met at Felicias place instead, maybe this should be the new way of rehearsing so we get to go home to everyone in the group?

Well, here´s some pictures from the two days.

Blessings
/Jakob

Blog readers from many different countries

We in Praise Unit are proud to say that we have had readers from many different countries on our new blog! It's great for us to see that people all over the world is following Praise Unit in the making of the new CD "The Mission Field". So far we've had visitors from Sweden, Spain, Germany, Norway, France, United States, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Singapore, Brunei etc.

Flensburg.... Västerås... Oslo... Madrid... Milan... Los Angeles... Please send us a comment and tell us where YOU are from!

Thoughts after one week of recording...

Tobias have written some reports from the past week's recordings, which I myself like to read a lot. To me the recording of "the Mission Field" is an adventure in so many ways. It's a lot like sowing seeds without knowing what kinds of flowers will grow from the seeds you plant. Because even though we have started recording we are not yet sure about how we will actually finish the songs. The great thing about it though is that every singer and every musician is putting all of his or her talent into this, and if we all have the same goal, see the same mission field to our inner vision, we will not only love it while we work with it, but also enjoy the feeling of content once the record starts spinning on our turn tables (or starts rotating under the laser beam to use a more updated language).

Tobias is laying a foundation on all the songs in his studio, and then we use that to work our way through the production. Kristian is planning on playing on a burning grand piano which of course makes no sense at all, but hey... it worked for Jimi Hendrix.

Some of the lyrics for the songs were finished in the past week, and when I read them through I can see that am influenced by things I am going through right now. I have reasons to think about what I value in life, what is really important and what things are up to me to decide. I like to share thoughts like this in my songs, because I know we all go through times when need to stop and think about what is really important. There are also songs that just praise Jesus with no holding back. Because no matter what I go through I always come back to that there is nothing like standing before my creator and just praise him for how he lifted me up when I thought I was too deep to get up.

What happened to the bomb?

Information travels at the speed of lightning these days. Just a few minutes after I had spoken to the newspaper about the supposed bomb that was placed just across the street from our recording studio last friday, me, Tobias and Andreas started getting phone calls from people who were worried about our situation. Once we could confirm that there was nothing to fear I started getting phone calls from all my funny friends who simply assume that I do anything to promote the new Praise Unit CD. It's true that I tried to get the newspapers to write about the ideology behind "the Mission Field", the complexity of the songs, how the new sound compares to the sound on "Whole", what guest artists we will have and so on. But unfortunately they only wanted to write about the bomb situation. Isn't newspapers just too boring sometimes?If you understand swedish you can read what one of the newspapers wrote here:

http://www.na.se/artikel.asp?intId=1460844

I just heard what was really in the "bomb" package. It was an ink cartridge. This means that either it was a harmless package or there's a conspiracy of evil men who are going to take over the world by using printers and xerox machines. Only time will tell.

Well, I praise the Lord that I live in a country where the closest thing to a bomb I have ever seen was an ink cartridge, and I can make jokes about stuff that are dead serious in other parts of the world.