Monday morning, 6th of March, I had a good recording session with my sound engineer and my guitarist, who just so happens to be my loving boyfriend ☺️. We recorded the acoustic guitar parts to one of my original songs called ‘Fighting Grounds’.
This is one of my songs that is going to be in my EP that’s being released this year!!
We also previously recorded my other song ‘Battle Field’ before I started this blog. It’s still a working progress but we got the whole song recorded in a day and now additional parts need to be worked out such as harmonies or maybe additional instrument parts. I’ll keep you updated on that in future posts.
Back to the focus of this post. I wanted to tell you a little about ‘Fighting Grounds’. I wrote the lyrics to this song a while back in 2022. Around August time. This is very significant as I wrote the lyrics right after being informed my aunt had cancer. I won’t go into details about it but it was very serious and a scary, stressful time in my life. Music has always been the way I process emotions or events. Especially the negative ones. So it was only natural I went to my room later that day, picked up my guitar and just freestyled for a while. I ended up, using a very basic chord progression, writing a full song all about how I felt but also focusing on the fact I needed to accept the high possibility of losing my aunt.
After I had written this song down I did feel a lot better. This is what I mean by music being like therapy to me. I was still incredibly upset and worried but I was a lot calmer and could think straight again. I recently developed ‘Fighting Grounds’ so I could record it for this EP because it is such a significant event in my life and cancer and loss are things that affect so many of us. So I felt that this song had a definite place in this EP and could hopefully show listeners that they are not alone in these battles with health.
To put minds at ease, my aunt did recover and is still with me and my family today. I am so grateful to this and though I’m not religious I do thank whatever forces that might be out there that my aunt recovered. She’s such an important person in my life and I would dearly miss her if she was lost to us.
Going back to the recording studio. We had a few difficulties at first. The main one being we needed to transition between fingerstyle and strummed guitar chords throughout the song. My sound engineer gave a great suggestion of doing separate tracks. One for the fingerstyle parts and one for the strummed chords parts. We did this eventually. I have to admit my timing is not the best so it took a while for me to time the guide lyrics correctly when we did the takes where we transitioned from verse to chorus. 😂
It was all good though, as we got all the guitar parts recorded by the end of the session. Here are some clips of the session below…
As you can see I haven’t disclosed the names of my sound engineer or other friends/colleagues. This is because I wouldn’t want to disclose names and them be uncomfortable about it. I’m going to ask what they prefer. Whether to stay nameless here or to be named. But either way they do deserve a big thank you for the work they put into this song for me so far. So a big thanks to them and we’ll see how they prefer to be referred to as in the next post. Thanks for reading! ☺️
My Music Journey ~ Katie 