A Day In The Studio For The Kingdom Project
Friday was one of those truly fabulous days. I was able to spend all day
Friday in the recording studio. We were laying down the rhythm tracks for some
Christian music written by fellow guitar player, songwriter, and good
friend, Ike Elliott. Ike has a post up about Friday on his blog too. The music is
part of a non-profit company I'm involved in called The Kingdom Project. I'll
tell you more about that in a bit.
Ike's been writing some songs over the past year or so, all of which I like very much. He has a real gift, writing in a style somewhere between The Beatles and Newsboys. After soliciting various opinions, the songs were whittled down to seven which we recorded the basic tracks for on Friday.
Recording music is a fascinating process. I've recorded in my home studio and
professional studios. But the process is pretty much the same. The songwriter
has a message and a vision woven into their songs. If you are recording your own
songs, you get to decide the next steps. But here comes the courageous part. To
really do a song justice you have to free it into the hands of other musicians
who are part of the recording and creative process. That can be scary or it can
be a very liberating experience. It's all comes down to communicating the vision
of the music, and the kind of connection you have with your fellow musicians.
The process in the studio can become very technical at times, becoming all about dialing in the instruments, keeping in time with the pulse, playing the right chords and notes, keeping it in the pocket, etc. Recording is like looking into the mirror - it doesn't lie. What's recorded is what you played. If you were ahead of the pulse, even just a little bit, it all shows up. If the musicians aren't connecting, you can hear it. And when the are connecting, the music just flows. The best part is seeing what other musicians do with the song and the ideas from the producer and songwriter.
Each person brings their own talents, ideas, roots in music, etc. Most importantly is a desire to try and achieve what the producer and songwriter are looking for. They may give you freedom to do whatever you feel would work, or they may say "give me a tasty David Gilmour kind of lick right there." At one point during our recording, the producer, Jeremiah Horner, asked me to give him "the biggest pick slide you've ever done." I set my Strat so it would get the kind of sound I thought he wanted, and let'er rip as he punched it into the recording. We all had a huge laugh at just how over the top the pick slide was, but you know, it worked in the song and it's what Jeremiah had in mind. And we all liked it. It was a fun moment that everyone got a lot of enjoyment from.
We spent from 9am to 8pm in the studio and the time just flew by. I only checked the clock twice; once at 12:45pm when my stomach started growling, and then again at 6pm. Each time it only seemed like an hour or so had gone by. Time in the studio goes fast because you're so focused on what you're doing, and because you're having so much fun.
We're planning to go back in the studio in June to do some doubling, overdubs, vocals and solos. That's yet another kind of creative process that I'm looking forward to. In the mean time, I'll be practicing using the rough mixes Jeremiah gave us on Sunday.
A little bit more about the project... This recording is part of a non-profit company called The Kingdom Project. KP is all about helping emerging Christian artists get their music produced, recorded and promoted. We're developing a web site with all kinds of resources to help new songwriters get a leg up on the ins and outs of copyrighting their music, and getting a demo or a CD made, and connecting with others who can help them. We also connect folks interested in sponsoring new artists or projects with songwriters, producers and musicians. Ike's recording is the first project we've initiated. We'll plan to begin our second project sometime later this year.
So if you are interested in learning more or getting involved, please feel free to contact me. We're looking for songwriters, sponsors, and help with the web site and content.
With the eminent round of additional
With the soaring interest in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), we are already
seeing the same metaphor used for other service offerings.
Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS, is becoming a common place term. Now I've also
seen IaaS, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service. As I like to say, no good idea goes
un-copied. What that means is we should all expect to be overrun by the use of
XaaS terms, where X equals whatever word or phrase any vendor, analyst or
marketer chooses to promote their product or service. If Sausage-as-a-Service
will help sell more processed meats, you can bet someone will jump on the
bandwagon and leverage XaaS to their benefit.
There are many ways to assess, evaluate and measure leadership. Bottom line
results, leadership style, strengths surveys, 360 degree performance reviews,
action under fire... I could go on and on. But one measurement that is often
overlooked is, what happens when the leader's not there?
Well, I'm fresh back from my unannounced trip to Hiatus. It's a long, sorted
and torrid story. To make a long story short, I was held captive in a primitive
cave in the mountains of Afghanistan. But thanks to my recent training at RSA, I
was able to communicate an SOS via a crudely crafted, low-fi Web 2.0 web
service. Fortunately, some Yahoo! stockholders happened across my plea, and
aided in my rescue in the hopes that after returning to civilization I might be
able to use my Network World blog to sway Microsoft and Yahoo back into active
merger talks. Alas, despite my best efforts, Yahoo continues to stumble along on
its own, suffering a 14% devaluation in the markets today. None the less, it's
great to be back!
One of the things I was interested to investigate at this week's RSA
conference was whether SaaS and cloud services (compute, storage, etc.) had
entered into the horizon of the security market. The answer is easy. NO. Not
even close. Security doesn't get where the software market is headed and we need
to get after it now.
I was talking with a friend and fellow musician
We have a number of job openings at my SaaS application performance management software company,
One thing that happens to everyone at one time or another is when you become so engrossed in
your own world view, you start to believe everyone else thinks the way you
do, or if they don't, your spin will fool them. Doesn't matter whether you're
big like Cisco and Microsoft, or the latest startup on the block with a new
mouse trap. You hear phrases like "he believes too much of his own
press" (I'm sure that's been said about me more than once, lol) or
"they've been breathing their own exhaust too long." I blogged about
what could be one such case of this,
building the
product, training the sales force in the ways you want them to sell, that you
forget there are other people out there. Companies may claim to already do what
you do, cover the same supposed differentiators, or have already beat you to the
punch but you just don't know it yet. I call this inward looking focus, "staring
at your own bellybuttons." 
I've come to learn that if I'm going to work at something, I really want to
have fun doing it. Fun not just in meeting revenue and business goals (and yes,
it's a lot more fun when you achieve those), but fun while doing the hard work
is takes for a startup company to win. Having fun is part of the
As a companion to my last post about
I've done a ton of software and product demos over the years, starting with
the first demo of a graphics program I wrote on an Apple II+ to my fellow classmates in
a college programming class.
I know that not everyone who reads blogs also likes to listen to podcasts, and visa versa. So I decided to try something different and see how readers and listeners like it. I call it a "micro-podcast". (Let me know if you think of a better name.)


