We help a new French vocal group record their first album.

One of the things we enjoy doing is giving other artists and musicians a helping hand with their projects.  It can be a daunting task to do a music album, especially for the first time.  The list of things to get done gets rather long; picking the material, deciding on arrangements, getting permissions, registering for royalties, practising the material, tracking, mixing, mastering, graphics... it can get a little intimidating. (You can click on the pics in this story for a larger version)

After doing several of our own albums as well as for other people, it's relatively straightforward for us to help someone navigate through this process, and we especially enjoy helping people with their first album.

So it was with a lot of joy that we were able to help a new French group record their first album in September of 2008.  This was primarily a vocal group that sang to backing tracks, and was a ministry of Word of Life, an evangelical missionary group that works mostly with youth in France.  They operate a ministry center in Normandy, and a few years ago purchased the Ecouen Center, where our Ecouen church meets.

Their goal was to record the songs that they were already using in concerts, so that they could have a product that they could leave with people after the concerts.  They decided to use the backing tracks that they were already used to singing with, and spent several weeks practising and going over the arrangements so that there would be no time wasted in the studio.

In the majority of the recordings that I've done, we've only had one or two people recording at the same time.  Once we had a small choir of about 12 people, but we didn't use headphones and used only two microphones. 

So it was a fun project for me also to have to arrange for several headphones mixes and record the whole group with individual microphones.  That gave us maximum flexibility afterwards for correcting any small mistakes and making sure the group blended properly.

They had picked ten songs, and we calculated the number of hours needed for the tracking (that's the initial recording of all the parts) to take roughly a week. 

It took them a while to get the levels correct in the headphones and to get used to singing in the very picky atmosphere of a recording studio, but once things started to click, the recording went quite quickly and in five days we had all the groups, ensembles AND solos recorded.  We had a great time together and I think everyone learned something and left feeling positive about the whole experience.  We also prayed that God would use this music and the album for His glory.

After all the corrections and mixes were done, we sent them to our friend Chris Janz for mastering.

The goal is to have the album out by Dec 19 so that it will be ready for their first Christmas concert. The name of the album, and the title cut, is "Nous sommes la raison", or in english, "We are the Reason", a translated version of the David Meece song.

I'll be sure to make a news item when the album is finally released!

Russ