Moving right along with the “Mommy Baby” song as it’s called right now- we needed some actual baby sounds to pull this one off. Now seeing that we have our very own in-house (in studio) baby, one might think getting the kid into the song would be a simple thing…

Well it took about 10 minutes of tickling and teasing to get enough variety. I recorded these on the iPhone with our Apogee Mic right when we woke up one morning. I then loaded this audio file into the computer and edited it down to just the cute stuff. Then in Logic I loaded it into the sampler and voila! Baby giggles coos and breaths right on cue.

Playing tag with who pacified Taylor, Jamie and I were able to lay down some final lead vocals on “Zoo Moves”. I set the system to just record over and over again in a repeating loop, ran out of the room and kept the kid happy while Jamie did 3 takes in a row.

The picture above is me using the multi-take editor in Logic to select which parts of each take we want to use. It’s pretty nifty: I can see all three takes and just drag over the part of one a I want and voila it’s instantly seamlessly edited together!

Now to keep Taylor happy long enough for us to do the harmony vocals…

So yeah, I’m sitting in my bathroom with my iPhone and my Apogee Mic- both of which items will instantly break if they get wet. What am I doing? Splashing water of course!

Working on our bath time song I figured it needed some real bath noises!

The new iCloud integration in GarageBand is something that has been über-helpful.

The other day while I was at work, Jamie was busy recording harmony vocals on the iPad at home. I wanted to hear what she was up to when I had a break, so I literally just opened the files she had been working on. Not only was I able to take a listen, but I was able to try out a bass part for one of the songs!

When I then opened the file up in Logic, my bass line and all of Jamie’s vocals were there.

I’ve just got to say, this is so frigging cool!

Jamie wrote the lyrics and melodies for 10 songs, now it’s up to me to write & arrange all the music!

Jamie first used voice memos on her iPhone to capture the melodies and basic song ideas. She wrote these while she was caring for Taylor who is now just 8 weeks old! Once she had those, she and I decided on what key and tempo each song was. We then made a GarageBand file for each song. We put a reference pitch at the beginning of each song, and then Jamie sang each one to a click. She added some harmonies here and there to give me ideas for chord structure etc.

We used a BLUE Snowball with the camera connection kit on my iPad and then upgraded to an Apogee Mic, plugged into my iPad and also on my iPhone.

I then have opened these songs up on my Mac using Logic 9 to fill out the songs. This has been our workflow so far. So far so good!

Hello!

I’m doing a lot of things on this record that I think are pretty cool, and I think some of you out there might be interested in the techniques and the technology behind it.

I’m going to be posting tidbits up here on what I’m up to- if you want more explanation on anything tweet at me @soundanswer or respond in the blog!