Thursday, August 19, 2010

Elijah Conference - Day 2 and Demo Prep

First, an announcement:

Tomorrow, I'm LIVE BLOGGING!

We'll be in studio all day, and they have wifi. Instead of blogging in the evening, I'm going to post updates throughout the day about our experience. Tune in tomorrow anytime after 9:00am Central Time and I'll be posting updates. I'll try to post photos during the day too!

*****

Today was awesome. We spent the morning chatting with our producer, Denny Martin, and working through the arrangements for tomorrow. Last week, Gerald sent him rough guitar-vocal recordings of his songs. Denny took these 'worktapes' and wrote out all the musical arrangements, including the chords, the song structure, and which instruments will play on each song. We're recording nine songs, so this planning will make tomorrow run smoothly.

After lunch, I returned to the Elijah Conference. I started my afternoon right with an awesome cappuccino, courtesy of my friend, Wess Adams. He and his wife, Susan, are some of my dearest Stamps-Baxter friends.

The friendships are half the reason to attend Elijah. There are so many sweet and talented people here. Today, I finally met my friend Rhonda Frye in real life - we met on facebook a year ago! And I also got to witness the birth of my friend Jennifer's new blog. Yay, blogging!

The teaching today was intense! To put it in a nutshell, Allison focused on being authentic in our ministry. Everyone gets tired of the church cliches - what can I say that is new and fresh and personal?

After this intense afternoon, I picked up Gerald and we went out to Antioch to see the studio and finalize the arrangements with Denny. I got to sing through Gerald's songs as we put the girl songs in a good key for our female vocalist (our awesomely talented friend, Lisa Mowry.)

Gerald and Denny started talking flat sevenths and minor fifths and diminished something-or-anothers and my head started to spin. That kind harmonic knowledge just blows my mind - not just the technical knowledge - I've got that - but the ability to use it to write songs and create new and exciting sounds. Love it!

We went back to the area where we used to live - had a late supper at our old Cracker Barrel (Coca-Cola cake!) and picked up provisions at our old Kroger. We're overwhelmed with how surreal it feels to be back. We're traveling in another country, and yet we're home. Pretty awesome...

2 comments:

Shawn Degenhart said...

Now Allison... you know there's no such thing as a "minor fifth!" Fifths, fourths and octaves can only be "perfect," "Augmented," or "Diminished." But, I know it was late when you were blogging, so I'll overlook it this time...

:-)

Allison Lynn said...

I told you my head was spinning! :)