February 24, 2025

Man this really has been Love Month here for Sarah and me haha. We’ve really been stepping up our date night game this month. Before I share this week’s date night pics though I wanted to really get into the progress of “Agree” that we made this week.

We filmed 2 HOURS of footage from our vocal recording session this weekend, of which I edited down to about 45 mins. It is the LONGEST EPISODE we’ve made so far, but it’s worth it even if I say so myself lol because we had a BLAST in the studio working on this song together.

You can watch the footage from the session (Episode 7) on the Agree songs-in-progress page here.

A little about this session… First of all, it came after 6 previous episodes of talking through the re-imagination of the full album, then deciding on a key, and recording drums, bass and guitars. In other words, a lot has to happen before getting to the fun part recording vocals. Everything we had completed before this vocal session seemed to make things go so smoothly though especially having decided which key would work best for the guitar parts meshing with Sarah’s voice. The new lower key than the original gives the song a whole new weight and grit that the first version doesn’t quite have.

An interesting tidbit that you probably wouldn’t be able to tell from the full episode is that Sarah and I haven’t always worked well together in the studio. We both have very strong, fixed, creative personalities.. especially when it comes to making music. We both have strong music backgrounds so when you get us both talking about our opinions on music, things can get explosive! We’ve been really working on that together though. It really requires give and take. I’m really proud of us for being able to do that so well in this session.

Our goofiness really came through too while working together haha which made it that much more fun getting work done together :) One of the things we planned on doing is creating an outtake reel of just Sarah saying “edit that out!” bahaha. (It was quite a bit of times lol, I even joined in a few times as well). Another idea she had was just a straight reel of all her big breaths she takes before delivering her vocal line LOL. For now though we’ll just stick with this 45 min episode as it takes a LONG TIME to scrub through 2 hours of footage haha! But keep an eye out for those outtake reels hopefully at some point!

Now that Sarah’s lead vocals are complete, we have my response vocals & harmony vocals to record, and then vocal COMPING, which essentially is a very mundane task of scrubbing through all the vocal takes and deciding which ones we’re going to use. Then editing/tuning any needed spots in the vocals, mixing the vocals, and THEN deciding if we want to add any additional vocal production work like extra background vocals or harmonies etc. At that point, once the vocals are complete, there might be some final production ear-candy items to add in like synth parts or other audio effects here and there before the entire song is finished to do a final mix and master!

As you can see, there is a LOT that goes into just one song, but our goal is to show as much of this process for you! Hope you’re enjoying the experience so far. :)

And now, as promised.. here are this week’s date night pics below… I decorated our trampoline in our backyard with twinkly lights, bought those neon glowsticks and we made a hat for me, crown for Sarah, bracelets, a little basketball ping pong game, and lanterns out of them. We had dinner on the trampoline together, listened to good music, played a funny date night couples dare game, and then finished off watching an episode of Ted Lasso together. It was a GREAT time!

Last but most certainly not least, I also took my two daughters on a daddy/daughter date to their school’s Daddy/Daughter 1950’s Sock Hop Dance haha! I included a pic from that below too. Sarah dressed our daughters up in the cutest dresses while I managed to find the right clothes deep in my closet to somewhat look like a 1950’s greaser lol. I slicked my hair back and everything and had to pile on the hairspray to get it to stay haha. I taught my girls how to swing dance which was a passion of mine in my teens growing up. Sarah took our son to dinner that night for a mother/son date and then I picked him up afterwards to take all the kids out for ice cream to finish off the night. :)

SUCH A BUSY WEEKEND!

/n8

“Fenwick & the Futures”