Right away in March, after arranging everything, we started performing our arrangements for friends at my house as part of my house concert series. We didn’t have things memorized at that point and it was kind of ridiculous how many music stands and sheets of music we needed. It was far from spontaneous at that point but the audience (our friends) loved our music, or just loved us, either way…we were happy.
The next step in May and June was to actually record the cd. I had hoped to have things memorized at this point but everything happened so fast and our arrangements were complicated enough that it didn’t happen. I was the only one struggling, Holly had it memorized pretty much right away. Of course, I have to give myself a little break since she already knew all the tunes before we started and just had to learn the backing whereas tunes and backing were all new to me…good times.
We spent a bunch of hours at Tanglewood Recording Studio in Reno. It was a joy working with Michael and Catherine Eardley. So helpful, so patient, and incredibly knowledgable. We’ve dedicated one of our favorite tracks to Michael for all his patience and hard work.
Recording was another area that I found Holly and I worked incredibly well together in. Fiddle music runs in her blood and when it came to editing she was able to hear things that I only pretended to hear. I just smiled and nodded. She was very meticulous, which is exactly what we needed.
I was happy to post social media pictures of us eating chocolate in the studio while working. Yes chocolate, lots and lots of chocolate. It kept us sane through those long hours of editing. As did our, after recording, runs to BJ’s for pizookies (yummy cookies fresh out of the oven, covered with ice-cream and chocolate syrup).
I had no idea how involved a project recording a cd would be, time-wise, money-wise, and energy wise. Thankfully it paid off and we were very happy with the result. We decided to do 2 separate house concerts/cd release parties at our individual homes for our different groups of friends. It was a blast…we had most everything memorized. Holly had everything, but I was still struggling with a couple…hadn’t memorized anything in years. I’m hoping that it will be faster for the next cd. Here’s a link to the blog post with pictures and video of the concert at my house and at Holly’s house.
No matter how many cds we record in the coming years as Fiddlers2 (we have several more in the works) I will never forget this first one and the amazing sense of satisfaction we felt at having completed such a monlithic project in such a short time and to such resounding success.
