Sojourn worship leader Rebecca Dennison has recorded for Sojourn since 2003, when she laid down one track for the original Christmas album. She played a big part in 2005’s These Things I Remember, and has contributed more recently on Before The Throne and Over The Grave, The Hymns Of Isaac Watts, Volume One. Here, Rebecca gives her thoughts on the different processes used for each of these records.
My Experience Recording Vocals with Sojourn, by Rebecca Dennison
Doesn’t that sound like the title of a report you’d write for school? This is all based on my imperfect memory and incomplete knowledge of the process, so Mike, Neil, Eddy, please forgive me if I’m grossly mis-stating anything :}
These Things I Remember -
We recorded at Eddy Morris’s place. We’d already used most of the songs at Sojourn so Mike Cosper already had a vision for them, but they worked a lot out in the studio. Ask Mike sometime about the “techno” version of the Christ-hymn. (Of course, he might then threaten to play you proof of why I should never produce my own songs, so…never-mind.)
We’d never used “Crippled Soul” at Sojourn and they (Mike and Eddy) were having trouble envisioning how it could be arranged so that it sounded sufficiently different from Psalm 51. They decided to keep it pretty sparse and Eddy let me track a harmony part. That harmony track was intended to be a “sampler” for Mike - some high harmonies here, low harmonies there, ooh’s and ah’s, etc. - but Mike liked it so they kept it.
I believe for most songs Mike and I laid down a scratch track to a click first. Then the band would come in and record their parts. Lastly, I’d come in and lay down my vocal.
Before the Throne -
Mike wanted to make the best use of everyone’s time - the musicians, Eddy, etc. - and he wanted the energy of performing live, so he brought the whole band into the studio, including the vocalists, and we recorded “live”.
They partitioned off the vocalists so that we could re-record the vocal tracks later if necessary. We sang the songs over and over again while they tweaked the arrangements, worked for the “perfect sound”, etc.
Later, they brought musicians and vocalists back in individually to re-track specific things and work on additional songs.
Over the Grave -
This was the first album we tracked entirely with Pro-Tools. (We tracked the newest Advent CD with Pro-tools but incorporated some of the tracks from the first Advent CD.)
Instead of “punching in” to correct problem areas and hoping for a single perfect take, Neil Robins “playlisted” the vocals. That is, he’d have me sing the same sections several times, giving me different directions each time so that he could take the best bits from each take. At least that’s how I understood it :}. And of course, courtesy of Pro-Tools, I didn’t have to torture myself doing take after take to correct a single bad note. Hooray!
By the time I came into the studio all the instrumentation had been recorded. I returned a second time to re-track the chorus once the backing vocals had been added.
