Wedding Music

Last weekend I got married. It was an amazing experience and I'm truly lucky to have found the woman who I am now married to. Part of what was amazing was the music for our wedding. Since my wife and I are both musicians (my wife is a music therapist and sings really well), we made sure and had great musicians at our wedding. We also created a CD for guests as a favor. Music is such an important part of both of our lives that we wanted to include our guests as well.

Here are three songs from the CD we made for the guests. All three were recording at the home studio at various points in our relationship. From a recording point of view all three show an increasing maturity in my ability to navigate Pro-Tools and to make better recordings.

The Gift of Love

This was recorded for one of my wife's patients. The woman had requested a whole CD of hymns and this was one of them. We used a single AT8531 - one of those hanging condenser mics that you typically use for choirs. That's all. The guitar was my nylon Takamine Santa Fe and it wasn't even plugged in.

I've since lost the original recording (hard drive crash from a few years ago), and only have the final wav file.

In the end, I think this proves how important a great performance is to recording and how accidents sometimes have amazing results.

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire


The first Christmas that my wife and I were dating we put together a Christmas album. Someday I will post the whole thing. Again, I was very new to Pro Tools and recording and understood very little about getting a good sound. However, as was the case for Gift of Love, my wife and I were at the top of our game musically. My apartment at the time had good acoustics and things just worked out well. We were using the same AT8531 mic and my Takamine Santa Fe was plugged in this time. I did master this recording a little bit recently just to bump up the volume for the wedding CD. Other than volume and a little EQ, the recording is the original.

Psalm 95 - If Today


This is another version of the responsorial psalm that was used at my wedding. This time I recording the vocals separately with 2 mics. One is my trusty AT3050 and the other is a small, dynamic microphone that was given to my by Cheri's grandfather - found at a garage sale. I should probably post pictures sometime. Its not a great mic, I don't really even know what it is - but its heavy on the mids and I feel like it beefs up the sound.