It’s been a long time coming. Finally Kevin and I got to sit down in front of the speakers and work on mixing Playground tracks. Kevin’s been doing a lot of pre-mixing so we worked on some small tweaking of some tunes, boosting this, moving that, etc. I love this part of the process where we perform some magic to create each song’s overall sound and identity, and shape the overall sound of the entire CD. Kevin and I discuss, listen and talk about the project for four hours, make real progress and decide what happens next.
Several tunes came into crystal reality, especially the Jump Rope Mashup, one that came to my mind as quite experimental, unique and challenging. It really is coming out wonderfully. It’s based on a set of jump rope rhymes from a book Anna Banana. I set them up between myself, my daughter Rosalie (23) and Kevin’s daughter (9) along with Kevin’s ingenious recording of him slapping a jump rope on the studio floor while skipping along. I then added a sound track I’ve worked on separately, with live playground sounds from my local school yard at Holy Infancy, bird sounds, the school’s kids doing riffs of Peanut Butter, Bear Hunt and others as a bed for the studio stuff. It’s coming out quite remarkably and is, I think, totally unique for a kids album.
Over all, the CD is turning into something we are both proud of, especially with the quality of the contributing artists, the variety of styles and the dynamic play between the various productions, from simple acoustic guitar to full-tilt funk, rock and roll, bluegrass band sounds.
Now we put them in order and make a final mix to master and send to the duplicators. The cover is being worked on as well. It’s coming together.