Christian...

• Hosanna
  • Hosanna - cover.  Drums: Jeff Holding, Bass: Carry Holding, Electric guitar: Eliott Maddox, Piano: Jeff Holding, Vocal: Dayna Montalto
• You Surround me
  • You Surround Me - Brian Doerksen, K. Padgett, D. Rademaker.  This recording was done as an exercise in recording drums.  Ironically, I didn't finish this until years later once I re-recorded the drums.  It features my friend Amy Plank on female vocals as well.
• Be the Center
  • Be the Center - Michael Frye.  This recording was another test of some new recording gear.  The acoustic guitar was recorded with an Octava MK319 mic into an Audio buddy.  This song was dormant for a while until I got my wife Karyn to sing on it.

More music...

• Private Function / Life Support
  • By Private Function.  The song by the band of the same name.  This song, recorded in 1987 with a progressive band I was in.  The song was written by Charles Conover with arrangement by Private function.  I played electric guitar, bass, and the Mini Moog solo.  Both Charles and John Collis played keyboards as well as sang the vocals, Charles singing the lead.  Bill Hnatuk played drums.  The audio quality is less than perfect mainly due to a transfer from cassette tape.
• Coat of Arms
  • Coat of Arms - Private Function.  Another tune, recorded in 1988.  Ted Rhydewski played bass on this tune; as well as the rest of the members listed above.  Some audio quality issues, but still enjoyable!
• The way they are
  • This is a barbershop type tune with some Chet Atkin's style guitar parts thrown in for fun.  I played the first part of the solo on a Hagstrum 12 string solidbody and the second half of the solo on my Ibanez 2630.  The harmony part to the second half of the solo was played live during the mixdown!
• Smiley face song
  • This song was done as a collaboration on artistcollaboration.com.  The song credits are as follows:  One thing I don't like about the internet is the use of all these strange screen names. Capablehands - drums, Jeff Smith bass, Saz - guitar, main melody in verses, r4m - guitar - clean picking arpeggio part with delay, Cary - first guitar solo, lap steel, acoustic guitar, keys, Gtrworks - guitar solo during buildup after lap steel part.
• The K song
  • The "K" obviously stands for Karyn, my wife.  You can always tell how I'm feeling by what's coming out of my hands.  Glory to God.
• Pamela
  • No, this is not a past girlfriend, wife, or daughter; I just always liked the name.  The middle section was complete improv - I just turned the recorder on and played..
• Siberian Khatru
  • A Yes cover tune done with guys from the internet.  The musicians were:  Drums, guitars, vocals, keys: Cary, Bass: Miguel Falcao Correia from COIMBRA-PORTUGAL. (He is the closest thing to Chris Squire), Keyboards: Claudio Momberg from Chille.

Seriously, this Yes cover was a lot of fun to do and I met some pretty talented and cool guys along the way.

Just to give some details of the recording sessions, this was a very hard song to build because It was built around the bass guitar track. Furthermore, this bass track is a low quality MP3 which I downloaded from Chris Squires official website. It is on his site as an example of Chris’s sound. There was no click track and it took many hours to develop a click in the places that needed it.

Once I got the song arrangement in my head, I had to play the drums to the naked bass guitar track. This was a feat in itself because I’ve only owned my own drum kit for a few months and have only recently began to seriously learn how to play. I learned to drum part during my lunch hour at work playing air-drums in my car.

Once I got the drums in place, I did guitars and then vocals. The vocals were originally going to be done by a friend of mine who used to sing this stuff all the time. He had to back out because it seems his throat isn’t up to the high notes any more - which left poor me to try and do this. I had put way too many hours into the recording already to just let it fade away, so I decided I’d do the vocals myself. I’m not ashamed to say that this was punched, comped, and I used every other trick in the book, to get this vocal. There were a few notes, B and C which I was able to hit and then I’d have to rest my voice. I was literally singing one line at a time. Whatever…
Enjoy!

• Long Distance Runaround
  • Here is "Go!" doing a Yes cover.  This was recorded on a Tascam 8 track cassette machine, mixed down onto VHS hi-fi.  All the synth parts were played on a Rhodes Chroma.  The guitar was the Ibanez 2630 into a Fender Champ.  Naturally, the bass part was played on a Rick.
• Eclipse, from And you and I
  • Another Yes cover.  This is Eclipse, one of the movements from one of my favorite Yes songs, 'And you and I".  This was recorded on a Tascam 8 track cassette machine, mixed down onto VHS hi-fi.  All the string and synth parts were played on a Rhodes Chroma.  There is some slide parts done on my cheepo lap steel, the leslie guitar parts was a combination of Boss ME-5 flanger and the leslie effect in the Quadraverb GT.  I used a Rick 4003 for the bass part.  My friend John, from Go! came in a sang the vocal part.  The drums were a Yamaha drum machine which I played real time with my fingers.  We did not program this as we wanted to keep the free feel.