We’ve had a great first week in Dakar, Senegal working with a new music team. Etienne is the lead musician who assembled the team – he also played guitar, bass, keys and djembe on various recordings. Etienne is an excellent musician; Ngurame says, “He is very maestro!”. The team created new songs in French for The Garden Project leadership training curriculum from Freedom to Lead International. We are so blessed to work with Freedom to Lead and with these musicians.
We had the rare privilege of using an actual recording studio in a Nazarene church in Dakar. This was a big plus because of the acoustic treatment and the fact that we didn’t have to tear down and set up each day. We put the four vocals in the control room, the instruments in the recording room and we set up our mixer and computer in the narrow space between. It worked really well – good isolation for vocal mics both from the band and from each other. The drums were the only acoustic instrument in the larger room, which allowed us to use overhead condenser mics on the drum set. We overdubbed all djembe parts to keep the drum mics clean.
We purchased a new Zoom L20 and Audix DP7 drum mic package for this project so that we could record band (with drum set) and vocals in one take since the L20 allows us to record 20 lines at one time instead of 8 with the R24. We used the L20 as a digital I/O (input/output) and recorded straight to computer using the latest Cubase Pro 10 DAW (digital audio workstation). The L20 allows for six separate monitor mixes, so that was a nice plus also. The biggest drawback was that the latest Cubase update changed the look and location of many features, finding and remembering the new locations caused a few delays and anxious moments the first couple days!
We are so grateful that the recording space had an AC unit – although it struggled to keep up and we had to close off the vocal room while recording (it got a little sweaty!).
Great attitudes all around and lots of creativity. Ironically, the only conflict we witnessed was while the team was composing a song called, “Conflict is Part of Life” – a little humorous irony there! We look forward to sharing some of the songs with you after we return home and complete the mixing on studio monitors (our field mixes are rough mixes accomplished using headphones and a little portable speaker).
Over the weekend we moved to a new location, got some rest, and made preparations for the week ahead. We will train leaders how to integrate the songs (and create new, local songs) as the FTL team facilitates the “Leading Change” module this week.
Enjoy the photos below!
