Musicians and studio bookings out of the way, the next big task loomed – this one for Ramona. By this time we were into Feb 2008 and Ramona had about five tunes close to complete. Now was the hard part – writing new music, putting all the charts into Sibelius and finishing up the arrangements, printing out parts for the musicians. We had only scheduled two days to rehearse all the music, so it was important for her to get the charts to the musicians earlier on.
Who’s Your Mama, Resident Alien, Garden Of The Gods and Rio Alegre were tunes that she’d written earlier and that we’d played in some form or the other at gigs, so we had some idea about what they would sound like. Eight Winds was the newest of the lot. Clearly we needed more music for this project. She locked herself into our studio and wrote the remaining music for the album. Did I mention she is prolific? 🙂
Chinese Whispers, Listening To Love, One Of Us, Gaia, Retrospeak. Song titles for most of these came later – we lived with amazingly creative titles for these like ballad 1, ballad 2, Untitled, Waltz all through way past the recording and mixing sessions 🙂 Sometimes it works to let songs name themselves themselves after the finished product.
Around the end of March, Ramona was done. She transferred her pencilled scores to Sibelius, part extracted and printed off the final scores and sent them to the musicians. I was impressed!
One Of Us: Rehearsals →[next]