Christian Piano Music by Greg Howlett

Recording Reflections On A Journey

Bringing a project like Reflections On A Journey from the initial idea to its completion is quite an ordeal and took a full year of work. If you are interested in Christian music and how the recording process works, here is the story of how this project came together.

In January, 2006, I decided to record a new project. Originally, I planned on another piano-only project with a collection of hymns similar in style to Timeless Reflections. In my initial discussions with Jason Prisk, my producer, he recommended that I consider orchestrating the project to increase its appeal. At first, I was hesitant, but began to explore that option further.

I am a piano arranger only, and knew that if I was going to add orchestration, I needed someone to take my arrangements and write orchestrations to match them. After talking to several possible candidates, I hired Steve Mauldin, a Nashville producer who has considerable experience writing for and producing for many top artists in Nashville. Steve is experienced in writing orchestrations for piano projects, and produced for the famous pianist Floyd Cramer in the 1990's.

Other critical decisions that I had to make included whether to use live musicians or not, and if so, how many. Live musicians are expensive, and even many top recording artists are using keyboard-generated orchestrations now. However, in the end, I decided that the better sound was worth the extra investment. To help control the cost, we decided to use strings only on three songs, strings and woodwinds on three songs, and full orchestra on three songs. The tenth song is piano only.

By summer, I was through writing the piano arrangements and sent them to Steve to start on the orchestrations. As Steve wrote the orchestrations, he sent them to me for comments and we made adjustments as needed. In general, I asked for very few changes-- I could not have asked for orchestrations that sounded more like I thought they should sound. It was like Steve was reading my mind.

In late August, Jason and I drove to Nashville and met Steve to visit recording studios and decide where to record. While there are hundreds of recording studios in Nashville, there are only a few that are big enough for a do a project like this. We needed a room big enough to hold 35 musicians comfortably and we needed a good piano. The last studio we visited was Sound Kitchen, and I immediately fell in love with it. Sound Kitchen is one of the largest and most well known studios in Nashville, and practically every major Christian and Country artist has recorded there. I did not like their piano, so we ended up renting a 9' Yamaha from the local Yamaha dealer and bringing it in for the recording.

Another major decision that we had to make at this time was how to actually record. We knew that we wanted the orchestra in one room as much as possible. Ideally, I would be in the room as well recording live along with them. However, an orchestra is incredibly expensive, and if I made mistakes, it would mean that everyone would have to record again. So, we decided that I would play in an isolation booth so that piano mistakes could be fixed without re-recording the orchestra.

Even though I would be isolated, we decided to record me and the orchestra at the same time rather than trying to add piano to the orchestra track or trying to add orchestra to a piano track. We felt that these options would be too difficult because my music has an enormous amount of tempo changes. I did not want to change my style to eliminate that relaxed feel, but it would almost impossible for the orchestra to feel those tempo changes without playing along with me.

One of the big benefits of using Steve Mauldin is that he not only writes the orchestrations but also contracts to hire the musicians and then conducts them in the recording studio. Because of his reputation and experience, he is able to contract with the Nashville String Machine. The Nashville String Machine is a group of some of the best studio musicians in the country, and they play on many of the major albums released every year.

Our first day for recording was November 20th. Jason and I got to the studio early and met our engineer, Bob Clark. Bob is one of the most famous and finest engineers in Nashville. He has worked on numerous major projects including several of Dino's piano recordings. I have always thought that Jason has a great ear in the studio, but I was even more amazed at the expertise of Bob. A great engineer not only has a great ear, but is also very efficient. With Bob, there is very little downtime for the musicians while waiting for him to do things. Since we were spending $3,000/hour at times for musician pay, I especially appreciated Bob's ability to keep things moving.

Recording a project like this with so many musicians is a very big deal, and a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make sure things go well when the musicians are on the clock. Bob and another engineer actually worked for many hours the day before setting up the room for the orchestra-- getting the microphones and headsets that all musicians wore set up. By the time Steve showed up, he had spent a lot of time organizing music for each orchestra musician and planning out the day. He was fanatical about making sure the music was right on each music stand and in the correct order so that not a minute would be wasted.

The musicians in the studio that day were absolutely the best musicians I have ever worked with. I cannot say enough good things about them. It is impossible to really put in words how talented they are. They come into a studio under immense pressure and sight-read difficult music on the spot without practice. Even when using all of instruments, we had to correct an average of only two or three mistakes for each song.

I believe that most of the musicians in the room had perfect pitch and all of them had unbelievable ears. After we initially ran through a song for practice, they would start calling out all the bad notes they heard. Most of the problems they heard were really my fault, but they always wanted to make sure that the music they were reading did not conflict with my piano. I was amazed at how much they cared about my project and they were passionate about getting it right. Several times, a musician would come into the control room and beg to fix a mistake that only they knew about.

Between Bob in the control room, Steve leading the orchestra, and the musicians in the orchestra, I soon figured out that I might as well relax and have fun because I had very little to worry about except for myself. For a pianist, playing with an orchestra is about as good as it gets, and playing your own music with an orchestra is just incredible. I still can't believe that I got to play my own music with such an incredible group of musicians.

Normally, we ran through each song once before actually recording it. Even though the first take was normally good, Jason usually asked for another run because the music got more expressive as we played it more. After we had the music basically correct, the musicians identified problems and the engineer worked with them to rerecord the trouble spots. Once the orchestration was correct, we stacked the strings. Stacking is a studio technique where instruments are recorded twice in order to get a fuller sound. For example, we used 8 violins, but we tried to create a sound of 16 violins.

In order to be able to fix mistakes in the studio and stack, you have to have a tempo point of reference. Most of the time, there is a click track that everyone plays to. In our case, because the tempo was so free, a click track would not work. What we did instead was have Steve do a vocal count track that he cued from my piano playing. Every musician heard the vocal count in their headphones, and Bob heard it in the control room. As a result, it was easy for the musicians to replay the music in exactly the same tempo for the stack and allowed both the orchestra and me to fix mistakes in the middle of a song without having to rerecord the entire song.

We finished recording the orchestra within one long day. At the end of that day, we also scheduled the recording of the vocalists for “His Eye is on the Sparrow” and “The Love of God”. We used six vocalists and stacked them each four times to try to get a choir sound.

The next day, we began working on the piano. While we kept about 95% of the piano recording from the live session, I wanted to re-record some places and fix some mistakes. This was a grueling fifteen hour process where we listened to each song, identified problems, and fixed them one by one. Our engineer painstakingly spliced the fixed measures into place so they sounded natural.

Once the recording was done, Jason began mixing the project. I am very particular about mixing-- I am especially passionate about getting the right piano sound. Because I consider my music to be fairly mellow, I do not like the piano to very bright. I also wanted to make sure that we had my idea of balance between the orchestra and piano so that we ended up with a piano with orchestra project rather than just an orchestration project. It took about a month to finish mixing the project.

Recording is probably the most challenging work that I do, but it is also some of the most rewarding work that I do. I am very pleased with how this project sounds, and am very grateful for the numerous talented people that helped me with it.