The Anatomy Of A Song – Part 4 Making The Music

Didier: I wake up one night and all I can hear in my mind is slide guitar. I know it’s got to be a part of Blacktop Shimmy.

The thing is, I don’t play slide guitar.

Jenn: Cut to midnight, sounds coming from the dining room/studio. What is he doing? Yawn…note to self – find out in the morning.

Turns out he was up all night rigging up his guitar and teaching himself to play slide. Impressive. Me like.

Didier: All I did was improvise a piece of metal between the strings and the fret board to lift the strings up ad then messed around to get the sound and feel I wanted…All in a night’s work, anything for the music!

Anyway, getting back to the actual song. The next step was to find the right groove then lay down this fun slide guitar part. The rest of the song just flowed out like butter.

Jenn: What!? Selective memory at work. Not butter yet. The first pass didn’t quite jell. (sorry for the food metaphors-but the studio is in the dining room after all!). But there was this really cool bit he had in there and after a bit of “discussion” and “pausing” we decided to build out the cool bit and leave the other bit for another song. <turns out, we do this on most of the songs we write together>

Didier: Now, it’s like butter. The song takes shape and form and the fills and bells and whistles get added.

Jenn: And the cool bass line too.

Didier: That’s about it. We got it done just in time to record the vocals at Studio D before I moved.

sniff,

Jenn & Didier 

The Making Of Africa

We were in the studio last week to record the vocals for two of our originals, Africa and Asylum. We shot some video and uploaded it so you could get a taste of what we’ve been up to and checkout the whole studio scene. The audio is not finished, it’s just a rough mix. We’ll be finishing the mixing in the coming months.

I kinda geeked out on the whole video thing. I found a little app that’s so easy. You load in your audio, video and jpgs, push a button and voila, you’ve got a nice, automatic video with transitions and a title and credits page. Of course, one can’t stop there! So I had to spend time looking for programs that had both this “automatic movie” feature AND the ability to edit every little thing.

I had to stop the obsession before it ran away with me (ie: the free trial period ran out). But then I found another app that changes video into flash so that I can put it directly on the urban fiction site. That was cool. Watch it here on myspace or on the UF site.

Enjoy.

Happy Holidays,

Jenn

The Urban Life

Howdy!

We’re in the studio these days working on some tasty new songs that you are sure to enjoy. We hope to have some samples up by the end of the month.  But you know how this goes, you tweek alittle here, you tweek alittle there, you get a new brilliant idea, you get a new song through the muse download line.

Or…you sit down to write a song and a book spills out.  Yes, it’s true. There’s a new book coming out from moi. More info to come.

We’re in a very creative phase and it’s much fun. You’re in for some sweet ear candy from Didier’s guitar, so hold on to your hats and stay tuned.  More to come about the new tunes, the new web site and yes, the book.  But…you must wait just alittle bit longer.

Anticipation….makes the heart grow fonder!

kisses,

Jenn