The following are notes from producer Roy Salmond reflecting on the process of recording Everything We Need from Steve’s Devotion CD.
Everything We Need – by Roy Salmond | Whitewater Productions
This is the only tune on Devotion I knew prior to Steve showing up at the studio in January 2008. The writer, Gord Johnson, taught it to a bunch of us at an artists retreat put on by IncarNATION Ministries in the spring of 2007 in Whistler BC. So it seemed an obvious place to start rather than trying to learn new tunes…
Steve was playing the song to me as I was trying to determine the BPM – (beats per minute/tempo). Then suddenly he played one bar, just one, with the swing guitar figure on the OFF-beat of the tune, whereas he’d been playing the tune more on the downbeat before. I said (yelled) “STOP!” and asked him to play the off beat bar again but stretch it out again.
Steve on Roy's ol' Gibson
Now the thing about an off-beat working is that something HAS to be playing the down beat or the off doesn’t sound off, it just sounds like another beat. The off beat has to be in relation to something that is ‘On’ to work. (There’s a really rich spiritual metaphor in here having to do with the opposite of what you think might work actually making it work, and losing your life to find it, but that’s another sermon or book). So I set out to create a groove or drum beat for Steve to play “off” to. I went to my sequencing program and programmed in a loop of hi hats, kick drum and most importantly, a scratch (or “to be discarded later”) bongo groove. Steve started playing the off beat groove to the loop and we immediately fell in love with it. It was very different than what we thought we’d get but it had an infectious quality to it right away. One didn’t want to stop. And that got played out! (Keep in mind for all this to happen, I’d say it took us 15 minutes – not long.)
So I told Steve to go into the studio and we’d lay down the scratch groove and a scratch guitar right away to build on this. In he went. I don’t think we even mucked about on what guitar he’d play, (I think he just grabbed a Duncan, Ryan or Stonebridge) – I set up some mics (Neumann 184’s) and recorded it. We loved the feel and Steve was playful throughout, even trying different beats occasionally. It just sounded so fresh! I put down a quick bass part to it, a kinda “white man’s reggae” feel. With the song sounding pretty funky (but light funky) I wanted to smooth it out a bit, so I put in a mellow, understated synth pad, just to add some depth and linear quality to it. And in the middle, Steve told me it should chill for a bit, so in the middle I got rid of the groove and did this quiet descending line. Again, keep in mind most of this happened in first takes and the song was sounding pretty full after about half an hour of real work!
Then, for some nutty reason, I pulled out my old 1950’s harmony lap steel. It seemed to work, so I laid down some lap steel parts, mostly around the rising chord lick that brings in each chorus. After we picked the licks we liked best, we got rid of the rest. Then Steve said, “Let me give it a try”. So he went thru it and did a bunch of weird but cool licks. The intent was to see if we like Steve’s approach better, but for some reason both of us wanted to listen to it with BOTH parts, me panned left and him panned right. With just a few tweaks, we decided this was GOD ORDAINED! OK –well, maybe we just liked it, and we kept it as is.
Now – many months after the album was finished (it took us about 8 weeks to do), Steve and I still marvel at this being the result of our first day working on the album together (maybe the second – we very well may have yakked throughout the first day), and that there was palpable magic in the air. (The “Spirit” for you Pentecostals). With only an hour or so of work we had the gist of a song that made us grin from ear to ear and wanted to keep listening to it. After that, the real work started.
Vocals
Without going into details, what is truly amazing is so much of the initial “scratch work” we did in that first hour ended up being on the final version. We kept most of the acoustic guitar (if you listen close there is the odd time where Steve plays around with the beat delaying it even more so it’s an off-off beat. Really strange but it works). We re-did the vocal but kept the feel the same. We worked to the end of the album trying to come up with a better bongo part but in the end the programmed one we did at the very beginning was the one we kept. After this we left the song for a while to concentrate on other songs because we were satisfied we had the feel we wanted. Over the course of the next few months we added in real drums, but kept the programmed ones in it as well. We tried another bass player but ended up kept the original bass part. We had someone else in Toronto lay an organ part, but kept the original scratch one we laid down.
On tour with Steve - fall /08
Somewhere near the beginning of the project another key event happened. We felt the album needed some large group vocals since this was a worship album and around that time three mutual friends came to visit us – Glen Soderholm, David White and Kathy Bubel. We got them into the studio and recorded them singing on all the choruses and some ad lib licks and then we all went out to eat. Then over the course of the next few days we kept listening to the vocals and Steve was not convinced. His gut feeling, and I deeply respect this, was that in making the worship album sound like other worship albums with the large gang vocals (or a least the beginnings of one), we ended up making the song sound like everyone else. So the decision was to do harmony vocals but eschew the regular large ‘group’ singing format that one finds on the most popular worship albums. This is again, where Steve’s ‘nervousness’ of sounding too commercial works in his favour.
So we had a direction set on the background vocals very early on. Nearing the end, we had Carolyn Arends in to sing backing vocals on this tune. They sounded great but the echo parts near the end didn’t cut thru. So we thought maybe her voice wasn’t high enough. Enter Gayle Salmond (my wife). We had her harmonize with Carolyn on the echo parts. That didn’t work either. We liked Carolyn’s feel but we liked Gayle’s voice – how could we make it work? Now – forgive me for being a little tech giddy, but here’s how we did it. I have a software program called Vocalign, which matches other vocal parts to a master vocal part. So if one is doubling oneself, or adding harmony to the lead vocal, I can match up the rhythm of the harmony to the EXACT rhythm of the lead vocal. It samples the algorithm of the lead vocal and makes the harmony vocal mimic or morph to it, so it’s exactly the same. (I’ve had many a singer kneel and kiss the ground thanking the great techno god for this wonder of saving hours and hours of frustrating work). What we did is take Gayle vocal harmonies, and MATCH then digitally, to Carolyn’s performance. Got that?? So if you listen to the echo’s at the end (In the morning Lord….) while Steve is singing the refrain (YOU are Everything We need) you have Gayle’s voice singing in exactly the same groove and feel as Carolyn did. Cool eh??
Roy workin' out the parts
It wasn’t over yet – more percussion to keep and toss, and deciding where to put the harmony vocals. Much discussion on whether this was over-produced (we were intending a small, understated song – I lead this song at my church with just a ukulele!). Finally, everything obvious was done but we felt it needed a small ‘something’ to complete it. We tried many different things – extra guitars, other esoteric stuff, and we were a little frustrated with how we couldn’t wrap this up. This is right before we were ready to do a final mix. I was sitting on the couch holding a guitar (I think a Strat) and we were discussing this and I was absentmindedly banging away on a chord just on beat 2 and 4, simple and off the cuff, and Steve and I both stopped and wondered out loud if this simple thing was what we needed. So we put it down on the Strat. You can barely hear it (it comes in at the 2nd verse) but it just roots the song somewhat and gives it a little more of a reggae feel (still a white one, but hey – Steve’s from Winnipeg). We looped some choruses at the end, mixed it, spending quite a bit of time getting the song to build gently at the beginning. But after some experimenting we think we got it right!
Whew!! – that’s a long blog, but since this was the first song we started for the album, we essentially developed the template on how this ‘simple worship album’ was going to sound.
Posted on September 29th
Thanks so much for this behind the scenes look! We were fortunate to see the Devotion Tour in Oshawa and remembering it while listening to the CD still brings a grin – I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a concert so much ….
You are all wonderful!!!