The Recording of Beautiful Life (April 2010 - June 2010)

The recording phase was the biggest fun during the Beautiful Life project. We started in April 2010, a few weeks after the recording of two demo songs. Compared to the demos, we decided to use Logic instead of Garage-Band to be more flexible with cutting and mix afterwards.

Our initial thought was to get the recording & mix done in about 60 hours, split into several working sessions. Alex invited Olli Seuser, a friend who has strong experience in audio-recordings for years, to join the sessions. Actually, this turned out to become highly valuable for the whole project. Because Alex at that time had quite some knowledge about how to work with the software and configure everything properly. But Olli was the one who brought the practical studio-engineering experience to the table, e.g. building a frequency-house and preparing the acoustic foundation the best way. Thus, we became a strong team. Alex the recording expert, Olli for the acoustic arrangement and sound-definition and me - delivering the content.

We started with the recording of the rhythm guitars. We have been amazed about the very good quality of the guitar sound already when we recorded the basic guitar tracks. I had borrowed a Lakewood M-32 guitar from my colleague Carsten. A very fine instrument with a good pickup. We recorded the guitar with one microphone and the pickup, and mixed the two signals together.

It took us 3 sessions to get all rhythm guitars in. And we started immediately to record my basic vocal tracks in another 4 sessions. In parallel to that Alex started to play around with some basic sound parameters to get over time to a sound-template we could use for the mix later.

I wanted to have the songs played all in a very reduced set-up. Like I did with the Katsy Redstar children CD, it should have focus on guitar and especially on the secondary guitars. On the first Katsy CD I have played all guitars by myself. Now, I wanted to have the second guitars played by different people, that the songs get a different touch. One guitar player, to whom I offered playing on four songs, was Marc Dehnke. Marc is an extraordinary guitar player and understands very much the origins of American roots music that I wanted to have for my songs. In two sessions we recorded Devil In My Soul, Beautiful Life, Secrets and Quality of Life with Marc on guitar. We used a Telecaster for Devil and Beautiful Life. Marc played Beautiful Life with a plastic Big-Lighter used as ‘bottleneck’. Awesome!!

The last recording session we did was with Tanja Wingerter to add some female background vocals to the songs. Tanja was amazing. Actually, she never sang before or had any recording experience. I gave her the basic guitar tracks with my vocals and some notes a couple of weeks before her session. She came to the recording session, June 10th, and filled all songs with beautiful background. Three of them more or less as first tracks. What a great feeling to close the recording and went into the mix. Which I am going to describe in more detail in my next blog-post.

Have fun
Katsy

The Orientation Phase (Jan 2010 - April 2010)

Today I am going to describe an important phase. Imagine that you have composed a few songs, and you are convinced they are quite good. What could you do with them?

 In case of the Beautiful Life project, my thought was to do something similar like I did with the Katsy Redstar children CD in 2009: Record the songs, and based on the quality of the recording decide what to do with ‘em

• If the quality is fantastic produce a CD and make it available for everybody

• If the quality is OK, have a fine version to enjoy on my iPod and only give it to some friends

In January 2010 I had about 15 to 20 songs in the pipeline, where I was convinced they have potential to record them properly. Typically you have two options to do so: a) do it in home recording or b) go to a professional studio.

Option b) was in my case not a real option. A professional recording studio simply cost to much if you don’t have a commercial sponsor, e.g. a record company or label. Therefore I didn’t consider option b) at all. I also don’t wanted to be tied to any record-deal and want to spend my rare and valuable time trying to get A+R’s attention. I am believe my music is to individual to go mainstream.
 I had some luck in early February, meeting more o less by accident my old pal Alex Goeppert. I was playing with Alex from 2004 to 2007 in an alternative rock band in Mannheim, Germany. We have not been in touch for the last two years and somehow got into email exchange. We scheduled for a joint dinner to chat about the good old times.

At dinner Alex told me that he has started to play around with some recording equipment. Mainly to record his own songs to be independent from paying for a studio (option b). He offered me to have a look at his stuff. This was quite interesting to me, as I was thinking, if I should start getting into more advanced homerecording recording it by myself.

A couple of weeks later we met at Alex apartment and recorded two demo tracks with Garage-Band. The interesting thing: Alex had build a ‘Sound-Box’. A 1,5 x 1,5 square meter wide sound-isolating room inside his apartment. This allowed us to separate the signals - voice & guitar - very much from any other noise and room-acoustic behavior.

The quality we reached in 4 hours with the recording & mix of two demo songs –Small World and Trust- was simply awesome. Alex also liked the songs. And after another week, we had made a small plan to jointly record more songs. This was the starting point for the recording of Beautiful Life.

You will read about it in my upcoming blog post.

Best regards

Katsy Redstar