Billy McBolan - Session 3 - 19th July 2012

Session times: 11am - 4pm

Billy arrived a few minutes early along with his wife Jacqueline (or roadie as he called her!). He brought his digital piano and his Martin 12-string acoustic.  Although I do have a keyboard at the studio, it doesn't have the feel of a real piano.  At the last session, Billy tried playing a piano part on it, but he preferred to play his own.  He also brought his own supply of Earl Grey tea bags. 

We spent a few minutes connecting the piano to the recording equipment.  The only signal out was for headphones, so I used a splitter to get the left and right signals. Unfortunately there was a lot of noise, so we ended up just using a mono signal.  When recording keyboards, I usually connect to the MIDI port and record both the audio and MIDI during a performance.  This means that any simple mistakes on the recording can be fixed with some MIDI editing and then play back the MIDI and record it the audio again.


I normally have a jar of sweets on the 'talent' table, which this week is Licorice All-Sorts.  Billy tucked into these with gusto.

Part 1 - Strange Love

The first part of this session (about 90 minutes) was to add some of piano flourishes to the song from the previous session.  His daughter was really impressed with the instrumental version he took away last time but she wasn't quite ready to record the vocal yet and, as we were going to record another song she was to sing, Billy thought it better to bring her along when we had both ready.

Part 2 - I Just Can't Fall

The rest of the session was used to re-record a song Billy had recorded at another studio.  He wanted to make some changes to the song, but unfortunately, the master tapes had been destroyed, so we had to start again!
Billy had sent me a CD of the track a couple of weeks ago.  I had imported it, worked out the tempo and laid down the bass and drums the previous day, so there was enough to work with before Billy had arrived.
He put down a straight piano part, just chords, and then overdubbed some 'twiddly bits' afterwards.  Then we added some string parts, mostly long chords and a few melodies.  Billy is the first to admit he's not a pianist, but he was able to play a pretty good version and because we recorded the MIDI, I was able to straighten up (or quantize) the notes that had been played, fix a few mistakes, then play back the MIDI and record the corrected audio from the piano.

We were going to add a few acoustic guitar parts, but we were both getting a bit of a 'studio headache', so we agreed a quick mix, I put both the songs on a CD and we finished the session just before 4pm.