SEAL conference, Warwick, 1999 - the theme is
"Learning in Harmony" -
Veronica says, "David, I have a song inside me - I thought you might
help me let it out" - so David plays the guitar to Veronica's singing
- her first time in public, it turns out - and 350 people at the plenary
join in the chorus '...making
contact in harmony...'
SEAL conference, Buenos Aires, 2000
- the theme is "Seeds of
Confidence" -
Veronica says, "David, we want to use Agneta Fältskog's
'Let it Shine'
as the conference
song - repeated each day so everyone knows it and sings it
from deep down in their heart" - David says "OK, we can do
that - but your song is much more audience-friendly... the
words can reflect the 'Seeds of Confidence' theme, and once
they know it other people can sing their own verses..." - OK
- "Three verses, three people: let's have Veronica singing
the first verse, Henk the second, David the third" - we
don't have time to work out harmony parts in any detail, we
just agree that Veronica leaves the tune to Henk when he
takes it, and that works well enough for now - later, "Three
lines, three people - let's have each of us singing one
line, then there's room for more other people to add their
thought, their word, their line later on..." -
Eva takes the stage as a singer -
Adrian is the natural choice as
guitarist, David is delighted to switch to keyboard...
Post-conference unwinding,
debriefing, reflection... David visits his multimedia friend
Ramiro
Atucha - turns
out Ramiro's friend has a sound studio where people can
record for free, and we book a time - those angel-singing
participants have all gone home, Eva's on the plane to
England, Adrian's in Tierra del Fuego, but the rest of the
group leaves in good time, gets there early to dump the
instruments - David pushes the open street door and goes up:
ah! it's a private flat, oops, sorry - time to enjoy an
ice-cream at a street-café - then we're shown into a
black room three metres square, walls padded with
mattresses, all the air breathed up aeons ago - turns out
the recording equipment consists of a domestic
cassette-deck, well that's OK if that's what there is - we
squeeze into the small space left by the drum-kit, it's as
roomy as the London underground in rush hour, the mikes are
set up, we're ready to record - "OK, so who's got a
cassette?" - ah, no-one - it's 8pm but Ramiro goes down to
the corner shop and gets one - David tunes the harp and we
go for a take - after three tries which all sound as if they
were recorded under water, the guy recognises that it's the
cassette deck which is running unevenly - he rings
his friend, it's even OK to go round
there straight away - we pack up the instruments, profuse
thanks-for-trying-anyway...
After half-an-hour of looking for
the street and asking
people-who-were-strangers-here-themselves, Ramiro says
"Let's go back and ask him again.."- ah! on the
other side of the railway tracks - now
we're there in only 10 minutes - this one is behind a locked
metal grille like a Hollywood sheriff's jail, and then down
into the cellar, but this time there is room to swing a cat, and there's a
multitrack recording desk in a separate control room -
what's more, this guy has a pony-tail, which always gives the impression
of deep technical knowledge - and we get the voices and the
harp saved for posterity in really a very effectively short
time...
Around 10pm, Ramiro says rather
apologetically "I'm expected at my sister's birthday party -
do you think you can manage from now on...?"
- David borrows their guitar, a
quality example in the best Spanish-American tradition, made
in Taiwan, tunes it down to a fruity-sounding open D-chord
like a bottle-neck blues player would - it takes Pony-tail a
good half-an-hour to get the playback working so David can
hear the first track at the same time as he plays the
guitar, but there actually is a final result on cassette
well before midnight - just in time for dinner, in fact...
Back in Sweden, it turns out that
the tape is recorded in four-track mono, so that on a normal
machine the guitar track plays backwards - David's friend
Kjell converts it to get everything
sounding forwards, makes a quick mix so you can hear roughly
what it sounds like, and burns it all onto a CD - David
feeds each track separately into his Mac computer, plays around for about
36 hours in Alberto
Ricci's
wonderful program SoundMaker, bringing the recorded parts down
a fifth of a semitone so that they fit with his
Yamaha keyboard, and uses that to add a
bass part and a synthesiser track - then it's a question of
making a million choices, with Dagmar's help at key points - toning down
bits that are too loud, boosting the bits that are too soft,
smoothing the voices a bit, doubling them up eight times and
adding some reverb to make a "choir" instead of all those
conference participants, mixing the seven mono tracks down
to two stereo ones, so that the solo singers are in the
middle, the instruments on either side and the "choir" all
round - about half the time goes to sorting out mysterious
technical problems, but in the end there's a file labelled
'final', compressed in MP3 format to a size which makes it
possible to transfer over the internet - and that's what you
can listen to here - it's not perfect but we hope you enjoy
it anyway...
Veronica, David, Henk, Eva, Adrian,
Ramiro, Pony-tail, Kjell, Alberto and Dagmar
