Recording in reverse

Since it was the vocalist that initiated the recording project I started last week, and she had the songs in mind that I didn't know, we recorded her first. This left a few interesting things.

1) Rhythm and timing. We didn't use a click or even have tempos picked out. I wanted her to just freeform sing it so her natural tempo would come out. It made getting instrumentation lined up rather interesting.

2) Pitch. While she's got great natural pitch, there are times - especially at key changes - that it came out a little funky.

3) Song length. I wasn't sure how long these songs would be, but the first one is well over 5 minutes now. I've been putting strings, organs and guitars all over the place on this and have our percussionist ready to jump in whenever the recording is ready for him, but I still feel like I need to cut some of the song to make it more listener friendly.

What did I learn from this experiment? Plan on recording some framework of instruments first or just use the initial vocal recordings as a scratch vocal track. This certainly wasn't the way to do it, but I'm making it work.

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