Immortality

One of the coolest perks in my life right now is a close friendship with a wonderful married couple name Alex and Jacquie. Jacquie is an artist and a stay at home mom. Alex is a musician and is part of the incredibly cool band Five O'Clock People (not to mention the worship leader at my church). He also is a producers for bands he deems fit (seriously this guy has an impeccable ear). They are the type of friends that are obviously a gift from God in my life. My sundays are usually spent at their house, eating lunch, playing with there amazingly cute son Sam, napping..... you get the point. This Sunday was a bit different.

Alex has been working with a new band named Atlantic. The band is comprised of 4 guys; Josh, Nathan, Alex (not the aforementioned Alex) and Jeremy. This band is phenomenal!!!!! One would think that the perk to being Alex and Jacquie's friends is that you get to rub shoulders with up and coming artists (as if their incredible friendship weren't enough), and it is. Hanging out at the Walkers so frequently inevitably means hanging out with Atlantic, as well other musicians. Today, however, hanging out and rubbing shoulders took a crazy turn.

After eating at Chipotle (a mexican restaurant) Alex mentioned that he was going to the Wire (a small art/music/recording venue) to "lay down" some guitar tracks for an hour or so. Knowing that Jacquie (who is nine months pregnant) would be napping, not to mention being very intrigued by the whole track laying down, I asked if I could accompany him. He agreed explaining this wasn't a very "studio experience" it was just a few guitar parts (seriously, it's all the same to me).

We arrived and I played "coffee girl" and made a Starbucks run. When I had gotten back, Josh, Nathan and Alex were just about done setting up with the engineer Dave. I took a spot out of the way on the floor by an amp and silently (well kinda.... these boys are all really really funny, so there was a lot of goofing off that happened. But lets just say I tried to stay out of the way though it didn't always work out so well:-). On the "to do" list was a chorus for Nathan, and verse and chorus for Josh and a whisper track. Nathan began and worked his part out for about 20minutes. Next was the whisper track.

A whisper track is just what it sounds like. It's whispering that will go in and around certain parts of a song. There were two that need to be recorded. One was whispering a line in the chorus to insert between the chorus and the verse, the other was random whispering for the end of the song. It works best when there is a small group of people standing around the mic whispering. This is where I became immortal in the music world. By luck (and a friendship with perks) I was in the studio and happen to have amazing (yet rarely used) whispering skills. So for several takes we all (5 of us) stood around the mic laying down a whisper track. When we finished Josh laid down his part and we heard the rough cut of it all together. It sounded so freaking cool!!!!

Now, I am fully aware that a whisper track does not make me a super star, but hanging out in the studio for the afternoon was a look into a world that I know nothing about and it was awesome! Truthfully, it made wish that I were the slightest bit musically inclined. And when Atlantic makes it big (and trust me they will, look for their CD sometime in the near future... I think, they sent the rough mix to be mastered. I don't know what all that entails let alone how long it takes) I will be able to say I was there at The Wire when they recorded parts of their first album and it's my voice you hear in the whisper on "What do you want from me."

These are some of the pictures I took with my phone so they're a little dark