Welcome to Anisa's Secret Recording Page!
Keep checking in for new pictures, sound clips, and updates on the CD!
Here are some studio sound clips (& full songs) for your enjoyment:
-Time Out (Finished)- (Posted May 17th)
Here is the final version with flute and guitar. My dad will be proud.
-Waste of My Time- (Posted May 17th)
This is the song that my friend Seth York wrote. Michael added some synthesizer and electric guitar to make it sound full. I love it!.
-Little Bird- (Posted May 17th)
This song was inspired by a friend of mine and as I wrote it I realized it was about me too. It's about a lot of girls, really. Michael added some piano which makes the song soar. You'll notice that at the end of the song there are a few notes from a very well known piece of music that ties in with the song. Hmmm... I wonder if they'll sue me?
-This Place- (Posted May 17th)
Many of you know this song well. It's my farewell present to my family when I moved away. My friend Sue Kittridge recorded the violin part. We did it long distance too! The song was emailed to a recording studio in Alabama, she recorded the part, then it was sent back to the studio here. Pretty cool, huh?
This is the first time I played "The Mango Song" for Michael. He was moved to tears! My Dad wrote this while we lived in Haiti... it's in broken Haitian Creole (the native language). Will this be on the CD? We'll see...
This is the first time Michael heard this song too. I was plunking songs for him to hear so we could work on arrangements and get ideas for instrumentation. This is just guitar and vocal. But... wait until you hear what Michael's going to do with it!
-Human-
Here is a rough idea of what Michael has in mind for this song. All the sound clips here are rough and
most of the tracks won't actually end up on the CD.
-Time Out-
Here's an easy going song that my dad wrote. We're thinking about putting a flute in there somewhere...
-More photos at bottom of page-
Anisa's Official Studio Session Journal Entries
4/6/07
Well, after 3 months in Seattle I’m back in Michigan! J As you know, I couldn’t do any recording while I was out there but now I’m getting ready to go back into the studio to finish the last 3 songs. (I’m also going to add an instrumental piano piece). Two of the songs I have left need a few lyrics to be re-written. For some reason I’m having a hard time coming up with things that don’t sound generic or cliché. You know, like “Roses are red, violets are blue, if the lyrics are boring just add a kazoo!”
Last night I sat down for about an hour and I came up with one word. Isn’t that marvelous? Well, it’s a very important word… and certainly better than no words at all.
Anyway The CD will be released this summer. What a long wait for originally trying for last fall! But, as I have said before, it will be worth the wait. My producer Michael is adding so much to the songs- as you can see from the new sound clips!
9/13/06
Brian came in this session to finish the drums. So…
Guitar: check! Drums: check! Arrangements: check! Bagpipes: check!
Oh, wait. There are no bagpipes. Lucky for you!
On “Tomorrow’s Road” it took a couple of tries to find the right groove. I had a feeling that I was going for that I was having a little trouble conveying. It all just came together though. I looked at Brian and Michael and said “I’m sure glad that you guys know what I mean when I don’t even know what I mean!”
9/8/06
We finished the last of the guitar tracks today. Yay!
9/7/06
Today I redid the guitar part for “Finding Home”. After taking it home and listening to it for a while I decided that it needed to be faster… good to realize this before recording all the other instruments! When the guitar was done I recorded a scratch vocal (which means that it’s just used for reference and we won’t keep it). I don’t even remember why but I ended up having to sing the scratch vocal without being able to hear the guitar. When it was played back with the guitar it started out fine but after about half way through, with no guitar to reference mind you, I ended up singing in a totally different key from the guitar. Let’s just say it wasn’t very easy on the ears. I guess I need to work on my acapella skills.
9/6/06
It’s amazing how many subtleties the ears can pick out… Brian is an excellent machine-like drummer but Michael and I went through the drum tracks just to make sure they lined up perfectly with the bass and matched the feeling of the songs. Brian did a few different takes on some of them so we’d say, for example “let’s take the chorus from the first round and the verse from the second round because it has more energy… then let’s take the drum fill from here and add it over here… and let’s take out the kick drum on the second beat of the bridge…” etc. And all this with a computer. I love technology! Michael just goes clickity click with his mouse and puts it all together. So then he erased the tracks we didn’t need (there were a lot) by rapidly hitting the ‘ok’ button and at the end he says “oops! I deleted our symbols”. Ummm… you deleted our symbols? One of the hazards of the point and click method. But of course Michael is a professional so he has everything backed up.
8/30/06
Whew! Brian arrived ready to record… something that almost didn’t happen! A few nights ago he got stung by a bee on his hand and it swelled up to a point where “his fingers looked like sausages” as Michael put it. He had a gig that night so he actually played his drums before going to the emergency room. Hard core! But he was better today and he played some awesome drum tracks.
I love the spontaneous moments of recording. On one song I said “do you think it could use a drum fill right here?” so Brian went back and put in a fill. Then he came into the control room and we listened to it and he said “Oh, I did that?” He had no idea what he had just done because he played it intuitively. Luckily it was perfect so he didn’t have to go back and try to learn what he just played.
8/21/06
Today we sat down with Brian the drummer. What a nice guy! We played all the songs for him and beat out drum parts on our knees to make sure we were all on the same page as far as the feel of the songs. He’s taking a rough cd home to learn them.
8/2/06
My buddy Seth York came in today to lay down some bass tracks for a few songs. He is very, very, very good. He has a jazz background and can improvise like nobody’s business. This means he can play a lot of notes. In the studio, sometimes less is more so we toned it down a bit. When the CD is finished you’ll get to hear his tasty bass solo on “Tomorrow’s Road”. Seth also recorded the guitar track for “Waste of My Time”… a song that he wrote a long time ago with a female vocalist in mind. When he met me he decided that, me being a woman and all, it might be better for me to sing the song so he could stop sucking helium balloons.
7/17/06
Today’s highlight greeted me when I entered Michael’s kitchen. Michael’s studio is at he and his wife Christine’s house (who, by the way is a talented interior designer and has been featured in several magazines). Anyway, I entered the kitchen to find a furry little ball of fluff pitter-pattering across the floor. Michael had just picked up their new puppy- a Chihuahua/ Pomeranian mix. What a peanut! I guess she’s going to be interning at the studio. And yeah, we did some music too. More arranging and brainstorming.
7/10/06
First day in the studio! I’m recording at Mackinaw Harvest Studio in Grand Rapids, MI with recording engineer/ producer Michael Crittenden. (And his cat Paris who is his assistant… she has a very good ear.) Today I played through all the songs that will be on the CD and Michael gave me advice on the structure and arrangements of some of the songs. It’s good to have an objective ear. (For instance, he thought that “This Place” should have more of a heavy metal feel and that it might be more effective to mime “Who We Are”.) This is going to be great!