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It's really interesting every 6 months to receive the latest CCLI report – CCLI is the group that gives licences to churches all around the world to photocopy sheet music and lyrics for use in church. It's one of the best gauges of how widely a song is being used in church services.  Our last album was a deliberate re-emphasis on congregational singing - 100% of the songs were intended to be sung in church, and we recorded it live in a congregational environment for that reason. So more than album sales or radio plays, the CCLI report is the feedback we're most interested in on a project like this. And we're very relieved to report that the news is encouraging!

Not surprisingly, the most popular of the songs we've recorded are still the well established Take My Life, which was written by our dear friend Beth Manchester and We Belong to the Day by our dear friend Michael Morrow. Close behind were Hallelujah (cowritten with electronica guru Joe Hardy) and Father's World (by Jonny Robinson). That's to be expected, given the new album only came out in August last year and it takes a while for churches to introduce new songs. 
What was great to see, therefore, was how quickly songs from the new album are making their way into churches: particularly Amen and Fairest Lord Jesus with We Are Waiting close behind.
We were also encouraged to see that Found in You, Hymn 140, Stand Firm, Sunday Came, and Unity are all making a respectable showing as well, which is promising considering the album only came out half way through the reporting period.
I should also mention here that  Greg's song 'Perfect but Painful' has not appeared on any GH albums, but is still blitzing the field. Great song mate, well done.
Further afield, it seems our USA supporters are big on It Is Well. Pete Hodsdon's song He Is Holyis probably still doing quite well but I don't have the numbers on that.

Well that's the numbers, but what about your experience? Are these the songs being played in your church, or are there others that CCLI might have missed? Keen to hear!

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An apology - I while back I promised to post about recording and mixing our latest album 'Unity' and I let it slide... but here it is! (Surely the phrase 'better late than never' still carries some weight, right?!).

Many of you were there and saw the recording! We did two nights of live recording that were open to the public, and one that was not, just to ensure we had 3 takes of everything. Nothing was re-recorded or added in the studio after those live recordings - what you saw (and heard!) is what you got!

Next came mixing. Mixing involves taking all of the recorded sounds and balancing them. With bands like ours, it means balancing the drums and bass against the guitars and keyboards, and then balancing the overall band sound against the vocals. It wouldn't be much use, for instance, if the snare drum was way louder than the lead vocal!

In my view, the mixing process can either make or break a project. It doesn't matter how good the recorded instruments sound on their own - if it's not carefully mixed, the listener will not enjoy the end product. It's the studio equivalent of mixing the front of house sound at a gig.

We had the privilege of once again having multiple ARIA-award winner David Nicholas mix this album (he also mixed our last album). He has worked with artists including Sting, Elton John, Midnight Oil and Delta Goodrem, so we knew we were in good hands! But every band has a distinct sound, and every song has a distinct sound too. So it's important that the band works closely with the mix engineer to achieve the desired result.

David, Trent and I headed down to Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne where David mixed the album over a 5 day period. (It was an awesome studio to work at - tonnes of great Aussie albums have been made there).

As David mixed, Trent and I would provide feedback. It's a gruelling process, with back to back 12-13 hours days. Overnight we'd review the mixes (with helpful feedback from the band members in Sydney too), then head back to the studio the following morning to do a revised mix of each song. We'd then review the revised mixes that night, and so on.

It's quite a surreal experience, sitting in a studio all day listening to very particular aspects of each song (it's not uncommon to listen to only drums for an hour at a time!). But it's great fun immersing yourself in something you've worked hard to bring this far - I remember sitting in a café one morning listening to a version of the mixes on headphones and taking notes, entirely oblivious to what was going on in reality around me...the music was all that mattered.

I always find it helpful to listen back to the mixes closely on headphones, but also on a few different stereo systems (car stereo, lounge room stereo etc) just to work out which elements of the mix are being affected by the different system you play it back on, and which elements are consistent across the systems. It's then important to let the mix sit for a while, returning to it later with fresh ears, so you can have some perspective on it.

Getting a mix to sound 'right' is a hugely subjective thing. But for this album, there were some things to bear in mind:

- Our music is seeking to help people reflect on God's Word as we seek to let the Word dwell richly within us (Colossians 3:16). So the lyrics must be clearly audible above the band sound, and the band sound must support those lyrics.
- There were musical points of interest and certain elements in a song that were unique to that song. It was important to identify these things early on and ensure they came through well in the mix (in 'Fairest Lord' for example, the offbeat acoustic guitar part carries the rhythm of the song, but is also a unique flavour in that song.)

- We wanted the voices of the congregation and the choir who sang at the live recordings to feature on each track. This not only offered a guide as to how the song could be sung congregationally, it also added a beautiful ambience to the overall sound.

Recently I was in the studio working on a mix for another project and was reminded of one of the most important ingredients in the mixing process: patience - both for you as the artist, and also the mix engineer. You've written the songs, you've recorded them, and you just want people to be able to hear them! But you can't expect to get the mix right instantly - lots of revisions will be required. But when you get the sound you've been imagining in your head all along, it's thoroughly rewarding. We hope you like the sound of 'Unity' as much as we do!

GC

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It's been a while since the last blog on making our latest album, 'Unity'. But now that many of you have heard the album, hopefully unpacking how we made it will make even more sense. We are keen to share some of our experiences so that the challenge of writing and recording church songs can perhaps be made a little bit easier for you. Of course there's no manual for making an album, but we've found the processes we're sharing here to be hugely beneficial over the last couple of albums we've made.  

So, what on earth is pre-production? It can seem like jargon that makes sense only to those in the know (like 'key grip' in the credits of a film!). Each band probably has its own definition of pre-production. But for us, it is the time we spend working on the songs after writing them and before hitting record.

We bunkered down for two weeks in January 2011 with a list of 13 songs that we thought would make the album. In the first week, we rehearsed the songs intensely. We developed the parts for each instrument. We chopped the songs up into sections, workshopped them, and put them back together...the result often sounding very different from where we began!

In song writing, we want to help people let the word of Christ dwell richly within them (Colossians 3:16). So we scrutinised lyrics - a lot. Importantly, we also sent the songs to church music directors around Australia to gain objective feedback. The need to do something similar to this in pre-production cannot be overstated - songs that are intended to be sung (or at least listened to) by thousands of people need to be carefully critiqued by more than the small number of people in a band before being released.

We selected music directors who would approach the songs from a range of angles, and wouldn't simply tell us what we wanted to hear. The challenge for us, as songwriters, is to have the humility to be open to hearing and embracing feedback. (See the blog post 'Pride and Scratching' below for more thoughts on humility). That often means re-writing sections of songs, or ditching a song altogether - painful but always worth it.

In the second week, our producer David Nicholas joined us. David had been developing thoughts on the songs well before he joined us. David brought an essential external perspective to the process. He was able to dissect the songs in ways we couldn't because we were too close to them. His musical insights into arrangements, sounds, and parts were absolutely invaluable.  And with his vast experience, he helped identify the unique element in each song that would contribute to making a balanced and exciting album (and live show in the recording process!).

All of the 13 songs made it onto the album - except one. It was a song we really liked, but just couldn't seem to get right in pre-production. Sometimes that happens, and we hope the song will turn up somewhere else down the track. (eg, 'May the Words' off this album was written for our last album, but we couldn't quite nail it then...it resurfaced two years later!). So letting songs breathe over a period of time serves a crucial role.

From February to May we spent one night a week rehearsing and fine-tuning the songs. Many of you joined us on those wonderful nights in May when the record button was finally pressed...in the next blog we'll talk about the recording and mixing processes. Stay tuned!
GC

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The thing about creativity is that you need to make space for it.  If you clutter your life and mind with busyness, routines, tasks, chores, and noise, you are not giving creativity a chance to breathe.

So in October 2010, as we set about writing the new album ‘Unity’, we each dedicated good amounts of time to letting creativity breathe in our lives. Contradictory though it may sound, we were disciplined about creativity. Although songs sometime come to you very quickly in the writing process, our experience is that this is more the exception than the rule. An initial idea or lyrics may come very quickly, as may the shape of the song. But lots of hard work is required to distil those ideas into a coherent piece of art that takes you on a journey and gets under your skin…

We met in pairs and threes and wrote over tea in our living rooms. We took trips to a couple of beach houses in threes and fours, and let the environments inspire us. The songs sometimes started with half-finished ideas we had lying around, sometimes with a simple melodic fragment, sometimes with a lyric, and sometimes just with a drum groove. With ‘Fairest Lord Jesus’, for example, it was just the suggestion of writing a song in E flat that gave birth to the song. It was wonderful for us to approach songwriting from so many different angles and to be reminded anew that no approach is more correct than another. Even more than that, we were reminded anew that we are just the vessels for these songs – they came from God.

With more than double the number of songs we’d need for an album demo’d up, we convened in January this year to decide which songs would make the album. There were so many factors to consider. Was the song saying something unique theologically? Could a church sing it? Was it catchy? Would it help create a balanced album, or did it sound exactly like the rest of the songs? After a tough voting process, we entered the pre-production period with a list of thirteen songs, aware that we could cut a couple if needs be – not because the songs wouldn’t be good enough, but because often in the pre-production process, it emerges that, for any of the reasons above, a song just may not fit an album.

But it is hard to put a full stop on writing a song. The writing continues up until the moment you press record… So in the next blog we’ll take you inside the pre-production room!

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Just an update about the sheet music for all the new songs sung at our album recording - we're working on them right now!

When the album is released in early July you'll be able to download the sheet music, lyrics, piano arrangements and powerpoint files for free (as with all our albums).

I'm going to try to put together piano arrangements for all of them because we get lots of requests for them. It's tricky to know quite how to put piano arrangements together - because to do the arrangement you need to know what other instruments are playing at the same time. If there is a bass player, for instance, I really don't want to be playing the root note of each chord in the left hand (that'll just annoy her!). So for the piano arrangements I'm going to assume that you've got nobody playing with you except a congregation who is relatively okay singing.

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