On the last day of my visit to London, I had a very nice photo session with
Paul Harries. I have been lucky to find him, because he really always makes me
look ”pretty”.
I HAVE GOOD NEWS my friends. What Lies Beneath is finally recorded!!!!!
Only waiting for some guests that will record few parts and send them
over.
It was a great last vocal session. I am grateful that everything I planned
was accomplished. Also the things that we decided on the way have only improved
the songs making the overall picture clearer in the end.
First of all the experience in the ” Wetten Dass..?” Show was just amazing.
It was great to sing with Scorpions, of course! I have to tell you that these guys from the band are SO kind. They were treating me like a queen and I was very delighted of their support and trust.
The trip to Los Angeles was very successful and the songs that needed orchestra and choir arrangements are now ready to be recorded.
It is very exciting indeed to imagine how everything will sound in the end when these two important elements are recorded.
This time we have decided with Jim Dooley and Tim Davis who will conduct the orchestra, that the recordings will take place in few days in Bratislava. Slovak National Symphony Orchestra and Choir will be playing on my record.
I am very happy with the work of Jim who put his heart into my songs. I got again very emotional by listening his work. It’s unbelievable how gorgeous gift of music he has. You’ll hear pretty soon what I mean
I arrived to LA few days ago. It’s a wonderful spring here and the sun is shining. It was tough in the dark Finland in the last weeks, so I was already starting to miss the sea and the sun. The least I am going to miss is the snow work…
This trip is not a holiday trip though. I am working with Jim, Slamm and Bart at Remote Control Studios again. We are getting the orchestra arrangements ready and we are starting to discuss the mixing process with Slamm. He is going to be the one to mix all the orchestral tracks. Other mixing engineers will mix the rock/heavy tracks, but I’ll tell you more about that later
I have held a little secret for you all for some time now, but today I feel I want to share it with you all. As you all know, I am very private and dont want to share to much about my personal life, but due to some speculations and since I am so happy I have decided to tell my secret:
Last autumn in the middle of my demo recordings of my solo album, I started to feel very, very tired and also nauseated. I took a pregnancy test and guess if me and my bf was really surprised to see that I had gotten pregnant. Since I had decided to not have any more children than my son, it was totally not planned, but after the very first shock, it felt really, really good;=)
Now I have almost done half the pregnancy and I am feeling extremely good, but its due to this I decided to not do the solo this year. I am sure you all can understand this decision better now and I do promise to release the songs at another time;=)
If you want to read an exclusive interview about this in finnish, go to www.rytmi.com
For those of you who are not finnish, here are the same interview but shorter version.
I recorded my first ever piano tracks for “U” and “TAOLD”! The grand piano in the studio is Bechstein which sound I truly love. Bechstein is very moody piano in general. I have the same brand at home as well. In these songs you will easily “recognise” me playing the piano parts, instead of a professional pianist.
So if I don’t consider myself as a piano player, you shouldn’t do that either
The feeling in these songs is the most important matter and I think I captured it. It has been really nice experience for me to work with our engineer Jetro who has been so supportive and a great help in my “troubles”. He has good ears and is very, very fast and talented.
Still feels awkward to be playing an instrument (rather than my voice) in songs where Mike Terrana, Doug Wimbish, Will Calhoun, Alex Scholpp, Christian Kretschmar and Marzi Nyman are displaying their talents.
Yesterday was a quiet day. Only Jetro, Marcelo and I were working in the studio making edits for the songs already recorded by the band.
It’s great to be able to realize that some of the songs are already ready, just missing my vocals…
I was using one microphone that I very much liked in my previous recordings, but when we started asking for it long time ago, we couldn’t find that microphone in Finland at all!
So yesterday we went through quite many microphones that we had here with us and it was very useful. There can be really big differences between microphones and from my experience, the ones that are usually used in vocal recordings, are not so good for my voice.
Some of you were wondering that 17 songs is quite much for an album. Not all the songs are going to end up on the actual album.
We need bonus tracks and b-sides for different territories and singles. In the worldwide release, there are always countries asking for bonuses. On my album you can expect to have around 11-12 songs. I am lucky though to have more than enough material.
Last night Alex finished his guitar parts and today he returned back to Germany in the morning.
Is time to congratulate uncle Mike. He finished his parts yesterday and did a magnificent work.
I guess from now on, he is going to sleep very well
Mike is going to chill out now and have some fun with us. Perhaps enjoining some red wine as well.
The song nailed yesterday by my two drummers is called “Crimson Deep”. Wow! It just sounds exactly like I was expecting it to sound.
I love challenges and since those times are long gone when somebody really was working like that in a daily basis, I thought why not to give it a try. And it worked!
I slept like a baby last night. It’s so quiet here that it even feels scary at times. But it’s beautiful to work like this.
After Mike finished recording one song in the morning, we had some guests in the studio visiting us. Pete, our live sound engineer came to talk about next shows.
Alex and Mike were sleeping long this morning and while they were having their beauty sleep, I was working with Jetro in choosing the best keyboard tracks for some songs.
It was not too shiny weather today, nor that cold, but since we are completely surrounded by snow, we still had quite a lot of light, which definitely helps.
Since you sometimes ask me about our coming NW album and when it will be released etc, I have some news for you;=) The plans are rough and it might be changed but as for now:
- Tuomas has 9 songs ready already;=)
- We all will meet this summer for rehearsals and arranging the songs and getting a demo ready.
- We enter the studio next fall and the album will be released EARLIEST in the fall 2011.