I've been trying to get decent recordings of my songs to use a promotional materials for re-releasing my books, and maybe even to sell a copy of the music.

This has been a learning experience, and mostly a good one.

A lady named Carol Kane was a session musician in LA in the 60s and 70s when most of the popular hits were coming out of the LA studios. She was part of what's called "The Wrecking Crew", an unofficial bunch of session musicans that played together frequently.

She writes about those times, and the experience of recording songs for LPs. One trick is that the band that made a song famous was almost never the band that actually recorded it for the album. Groups like the Turtles, Monkees, Archies, Beach Boys, and others wrote songs and performed them on stage. For a recording, where you can't be loosey-goosey with your rhythms or sloppy on a chord change, they had session musicians play the instruments and they just sang.

Session musicians are the serious musicians in the recording world.

Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwook Mac and some others were exceptions to the "hire a professional" rule. But most of the Led Zep and Fleetwood Mac members were session musicians before they became a famous band.

The folks we saw in concerts and on Ed Sullivan were good performers, but when they tried to record their material... not so much. They were too sloppy for that kind of work.

Anyhow, trying to get good clean recordings is making me realize I'm a pretty good performer.

I built a pretty decent recording studio for Carol. The floor is soft exercise tiles that don't reflect sound, I put quilting on the ceiling to also absorb sound, and have lots of slightly used dog-proof quilts around the walls. When you walk into the studio room, your ears pop from the sudden silence.

I found a cute little 4-channel mixing box that I can use to record onto 4 separate tracks.

Music-Go_round had a used guitar mic the size of a guitar pick that gives me a nice tone on the guitar.

This worked, but the microphones I bought in the 1990s aren't tightly focused. The pick up both my voice and the guitar, which makes it hard to do the post-recording stuff with balancing sounds.

I explained my problem to folks at Sweetwater in Fort Wayne and they promptly recommended a microphone that I can position to pick up my voice without picking up the guitar. This actually works!

I'm getting close to something listenable.

Now to work on tuning my voice.