Playing with Strangers Session No. 7
So, this session started with a last minute line up change: the drummer cancelled on the Monday before and I scrambled to find a replacement. I knew that it needed to be a very good drummer - I had some seasoned, creative musicians (Steve Fisk, Nick Shadel, Jaz Lund) on board for this session. I reached out to Steve Turnidge (local mastering guy, engineer and all around nice guy) and he gave me some names.
Christian Heilman was one of those names and the one who said "yes" on short notice.
Though I had met him before, I had never heard him play.
He turned out to be the perfect drummer for us!

We set up on Thursday evening for recording, starting at 6pm. The band got to do a headphone check and start jamming around 9:30pm, so had about 1/2 an hour to throw out a couple of ideas (one of them became "What You Wanna Do?")
We reconvened on Friday evening at 6PM. By 9:40pm we had at least skeletal version of all of the songs. We took a break and came back in to play and improvise for about 35 minutes.
Saturday morning we came in at 10AM and began the process of finishing the songs, arranging the set and getting some "studio" takes that we could use if the "live" versions didn't work. We rehearsed the set and quit for dinner.
At about 8:45 we took our places and performed and recorded the set in front of a fun and fantastic live audience!


This was a great session - I listened to the rough board mix of our Friday night writing/ jam session ... a ton. I should probably put that out there for you to hear as well, I enjoyed it that much.
Give Session No. 7 a try - you will like it. You can definitely hear everyone's influences.
On this session, all of the improvisations were produced with very little editing!

Adam Sturch did the artwork used in the cover. I discovered him on Facebook and he agreed to do something. I sent him the rough mixes I had and he took it from there. Fantastic.

I try to have all of the sessions filmed but for some reason the guy who promised to do it showed up .... and then promptly left without a word. Luckily I had invited some other film folks to the session and Bradetta Doyle-Vines came - with her camera - and volunteered to do what she could! Thanks to her we have some footage of the evening!

I was also falling behind on the post production (this and several other sessions) so Christian Heilman (AKA Mixerguy) offered to mix it - and there you have it!