Things Are Happening Fast...

Since the last post all parts of the musical have been shaping up. Leslie Stahle came up with a fun cover design showing the lifecycle of frogs, and our printer has built the cover around it. I'll inspect the proof tomorrow morning, and then they'll be printing a thousand front covers within the next couple of days.

Meanwhile we tried out a new singer, Dana Shaw, of Moorpark, CA. She sang a solo on the song, "All Parents Are Cute" and did a magnificent job. I'll be looking forward to engaging her services for future recordings.

Ace guitar player Mike Fishell came by on Friday and in just two hours, played on four different songs. He actually put three different guitar parts on one reggae-flavored piece, and dramatically transformed it for the better. I think Mike would have spent eight hours experimenting with different ideas, but I pushed him to do all his recording in an even two hours.

Saturday morning Brenda Tzipori arrived to sing. Brenda has sung on every recording we've done for the last several years. She's had a nasty cold and barely has her voice back. But I think you'd never know that from listening to her performances.

Just this morning Leslie Stahle dropped off the illustrations for the play. This is Leslie's fifth project with us, and her best work by far.

Are we done yet? Not quite. Lyricist John Heath pulled the songs together into a simple script appropriate for grades 1-4. First grade material isn't easy for us, because we tend to get too complicated. But John's script seemed very good. I made a few small changes and sent it back to him.

Meanwhile I still have one song to record completely (I'll be playing all the instruments and singing this myself.) And most of the songs still need some tinkering with. I've scheduled Tuesday as mix day---that's when the original eight-track digital recordings will be mixed down into stereo recordings in the computer. It's not that hard to do, but there are eight songs to mix...and then I have to strip the vocal out of each of them and replace it with an instrumental melody for the "karioke" version. Last of all I have to burn a master CD and sit and listen to every second of it to make sure all the tracks are in the correct order, with no skips or audio distortion.

That's about 40 minutes of listening, so I usually spend the time cleaning my kitchen.

Next Friday through Sunday we'll be in Palm Springs for the California Association for the Gifted annual conference. The Life Cycle books won't be finished, but we'll have a mockup and a CD that people will be able to listen to. I expect we'll start shipping a week from Monday.