2 hours and 14 minutes is about how long it took me to lay down a multitrack recording of a song for this Sunday’s online service (video to follow – I’ll let it premiere in the service at 10:30am on Sunday, to be found on the church’s YouTube channel).

The song itself, The King of Love (The King Has Come), isn’t a new one. It was actually released in 1997 by Kevin Jamieson and Stuart Townend and was regularly used during my time at St Clement’s. I’ve done it here in Thorpe Acre as well but I didn’t have a recording of it. Since it was the song that came to mind during this morning’s service (which is filmed as the basis for our online offering on Sunday) I decided to see if I could get a recording done.

I could have done it much more quickly by just doing a live play through but then you have to live with any mistakes and the result is going to sound fairly rough. Instead, I fired up Logic Pro, opened my song template (which hasn’t been used for a few months now) and set to it. The Logic drummer add in went first, defining the structure of the song but set to a very simple beat. I then added in acoustic guitar, bass and electric guitar. These had a few overdubs although, given the timescale, they are still relatively fresh off the top of my head. Next came vocals – a master take set in the centre, two parallel versions panned a little way left and right, and some extra harmony parts, panned hard left and right. This was the most time consuming part; at points where I realised I’d taken a wrong turn in the melody, timing or lyrics, I’d stop and redo from that section – not to the point of sounding flawless but so listeners don’t have to suffer all my mistakes.

Finally, it was time to do some simple mixing. I could have spent a lot more time on that and added in further layers but I think it was enough; a creative and intensive couple of hours. Of course, I’ve still got to work up a video but I think that should be a lot quicker. All told, probably one of my faster multitrack songs – nothing like a deadline to keep things moving!