singers and harp

["alciere" <alciere@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If this message appeared in an earlier garbled form, I apologise-email 
glitch. 

We had a guest singer come over yesterday. Now the right way to record is to 
know the lyrics and do a scratch vocal with the music right off the bat but 
the Space Animals always do things backwards. Steve usually writes the 
music. We jam on the music and record ten or twelve songs, then look at the 
lyrics I've written to see which ones will fit the music.Then we record the 
vocals. 

Trouble is, without the vocals, we always overplay. This time we 
deliberately kept it sparse, left big gaps in the music. It sounded rough, 
kind of choppy before the vocals. Once the singer started, the music 
magically came together. 

To keep the harp sparse, but interesting, I concentrated on tone (best as I 
could), switching harps-play a little in 3rd, a little in 2nd on the same 
song, changing keys (usually from tonic to subdominant)and experimenting 
with techinique-octaves etc. I don't like holding back. I've always just 
wailed away, but I'm finding the song sounds better and it's much easier to 
mix a simple easy arrangement. 

The vocals came out great. We got a young lady with tattoos and body 
piercings who can really belt it out.I find collaborating with a couple of 
different musicians really helps the music, keps it intersting. 

Rainbow Jimmy
http://www.spaceanimals.com
http://www.mp3.com/spaceanimals