Blog: Crystal Palace Session #2

< previous

Yesterday I headed off to distant CRYSTAL PALACE where I was due to attend the second recording session for the MJ Hibbett/CJ Thorpe-Tracey ALBUM PROJECT. The day got off to an excellent start when I got a BUS up the FLIPPING MOUNTAIN that Onecat Studio sits upon, thus avoiding both gradient and RAIN, and things continued in much the same way.

I met the aforesaid Mr CJ Thorpe-Tracey along with Mr J Blusher and, after some chat and also piano tuning, we got into ACTION recording a whole HEAP of songs. This time around we did piano tracks for When You Hear A Bird, Was This What You Wanted?, Chips And Cheese, Pint Of Wine (a re-do from last time), Wrong About Everything, 7 Hearts and Say It With Words, pretty much in that order I think.

One of the many wonderful aspects of the day was the PROCESS what some of these songs went through. Chris and I have PRACTICED them and indeed GIGGED most of them as well, but when we started recording Jon offered NOTES and SUGGESTIONS about how they could be done differently, which Chris then took up and DID. Some of this was entirely amazing to me, like when Chris took a piano part and played bits of in different octaves, or with different bass-lines, or even did the whole thing completely differently. It takes me literally WEEKS to re-learn something like that, but here they were doing it as if it was PEASY. When we started all this last year one of the things I was most keen on was to NOT stick to the original arrangements of all the songs, and here we were re-doing them on the fly, it was GRATE!

Another delightful aspect for me was that it was ALL Piano tracks. At the previous session I had got myself a bit worked up emotionally because I had to do lots of Proper Singing, but this time I was just doing guide vocals so didn't have to worry about it at all. Also this was now a studio and a set-up I was familiar with so could relax into it a lot more.

Along with all the ROCK ACTION there was also some ADMIN talk about doing another gig, what other songs to do, and indeed the need to get together some ASSETS like pictures and blurbs etc. It's all starting to feel a bit more REAL now - when I got home I realised we now have TEN (10) songs underway (not including our version of Mull Of Kintyre for Joyzine) which is bordering on ENOUGH!

It was a pretty brilliant day, all in all. Hopefully we'll be back there in a month or two to do one more batch of songs and also to do some SINGING, and then we move onto ARRANGEMENTS and so forth. I can't wait to be able to play these songs to people, they really are sounding Quite Good!

posted 16/1/2026 by MJ Hibbett

< previous