The Oasis Project: Dance

This is an exclsive pre-release post of The Oasis Project and any unauthorized use of material, all or in part, is strictly prohibited by the author.

For the past three or four weeks The Oasis band and choir has been slaving away in the reording studio to produce our latest worship album. Well, Barak and Randy have been slaving away. The rest of us just had fun!

I can only speak for the choir of course. The band laid down the music track a week earlier than the choir laid down vocals. The purpose of this was so that the choir would have some music to sing along with! Brilliant, I know. We had a rough start with the dreaded celebration song, but Barak loves that song so we all did our best. From then on it was smooth sailing. We had to sing each song (the choir part) twice because we will stack the vocals on the final cut. This will make us sound like a choir of 24 instead of only 12. (l-r: Barak, Jim, Dennis, Gary, Me;aka Monty)



We all agreed that the motto of the recording session was "hurry up and wait". It took a little time to get equipment set up and running smoothly. We took a couple of breaks and made it out of the studio after only three and a half hours. (Missy;aka Smitty, Karri)



Barak took the brunt of all the stress for us. His ideas often clashed with Randy's, whose studio we used. He did lead vocals on most of the songs.



I came into the studio the next day to record lead vocals on three of our songs. It was a lot of fun, but a little harder than I thought it would be. It is actually real work. I had to sing each song three or four times through until we had what we wanted.



Randy French owns the recording studio in Grand Haven and I really hope he doesn't sue me for posting his photo here. He is a very nice guy, but also very no-nonsense and can be a bit on the intimidating side. He said that he doesn't really need talent because his equipment does it all, which is fairly true because he applied auto tuning to most of our vocals to correct any off pitch notes. It is quite amazing what he can do.

We all worked very hard on this project, so I hope you will enjoy the CD when it is released (exclusively) in the next few weeks. I will be autographing any copies that you would like. I would also like to point out that Jeff did an amazing job on the trombone to contribute to the project. I'm sure he'll post some pics of the band recording session, and no doubt he'll autograph your CD as well. I know I want him to autograph my copy!