by Attila Tapolczai
2019.
This year began for me with the plan that I would focus more on the communication with my clients.
I mean besides direct communication with clients I'm working with, also the distant communication with my other, past and future clients.
This blog should be a part of this plan.
Now it's July and I haven't written a single word yet.
I have a very good excuse though. I've been working on many different projects in this first half of the year. I've been recording, mixing, mastering and playing with different bands. Now I have some time to report you about these activities and to share with you some of my future plans.
Angie Seamróg - Le Cairde - Traditional Folk Ballads
The year has started with the recording of a new project with a singer who actually had long planned to make an own CD. She's Angie Seamróg who has a beautiful voice and a deep love for Irish and Gaelic Folk music. As it happened at that time I'd also been planning to make a record with her. We first met on one of our Irish folk gigs with my band in Augsburg where after a short conversation she sang a song with us on the stage. Since then we'd been to several Irish sessions and realized that our music just works together. At the end of 2018 after I finished a very important project, our 10th album with Attila & Friends, I had some more time to jump into another project. That's how I asked Angie if she would like to record an album using my audio engineering skills.
We found great musicians for this project. Actually Augsburg and the region has quite a blooming musical life. We asked Pia Greenaway, a professional and flute player and her whole band 'Mandara' to join. Thus we had an enthusiastic bodhrán player Andreas Koller and a good folk fiddler who's an old friend and music colleague of mine, Hauke Iven Marquard. We asked another good friend and longtime music partner, Johanna Regenbogen to join us. Then we won Martin Leopold, an Uileann pipe and flute player for the Le Cairde project. I played the acoustic guitar, the backing vocals and the bass myself and of course Angie was the lead singer. The concept of the album was clear for me from the beginning. I met Angie as someone who sings folk ballads so this album should be based on folk ballads. Angie found a name for the project: Le Cairde (among friends) - Traditional Folk Ballads.
We were then busy for the next few months with recording, mixing and mastering. We recorded most of the tracks with overdubbing as it would have been very difficult to effectively organize a few recording sessions with all these musicians who have several different jobs. And honestly, I like to work with overdub, that's how I recorded most of my albums since 1996. Anyway, the recording was fun, it was really easy to work with all these guys. We used different locations for mostly logistical reasons but this time I found it less of a challenge to blend the tracks together than I did for some previous albums. It seems I've learned in the last few years how to work effectively with different layers of reverb plugins (This might...must be a topic for a future blog. Some time...). I did the final steps at the end of March and the album was right in time finished for the album launch gig on the 6th of April. This gig was so successful that we had to repeat it about a month later. We're all looking forward to what the future of this project might be.
I have very few and rather bad photos from the recording process which I would like to share with you now anyway. These were made in Neruda Kulturcafé, a holy place where art thrives in Augsburg.
That was one of the big projects for this year and the one we all could be proud of. For the official online release we still have to wait but I posted 2 songs on SoundCloud. Enjoy and see you next time (until I figure out my next excuse for not writing all this time)! ;-)
https://soundcloud.com/newhomerecording/health-to-the-company
https://soundcloud.com/newhomerecording/angie-seamrog-black-is-the-colour
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