SESSION SHENANIGANS
The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related by our resident session ace. This month: Forgive Me Father, For I Have Sinned.
Another year and another season featuring the sleuthing brainchild of GK Chesterton. As I park in a space at Air Lyndhurst Studios thoughtfully allocated by management, I find belief beggared to realise that we are about to record the first two episodes of Father Brown - Series 11. Or Series XI for those following in their hymn books. If there is movement in ways more mysterious than this, I’d be happy to learn of it. But for now, I offer up thanks to a higher power for this televisual blessing and its bounty. As do the members of the mini chamber orchestra assembled in Studio 1 by contractor Justin Pearson. As is the custom, I am segregated from my co-conspirators and seated in my own small but imperfectly formed acoustic booth, a musical confessional if you will, situated twixt control room and studio area. A music stand, a chair and a pair of microphones await, as do a camera trained on me; a screen flashes green bar numbers and beats, while a second provides a video image of our composer and conductor, Debbie Wiseman. To add to the isolation, Debbie’s image is transmitted via a fisheye camera lens , causing her face to change shape as she moves.
While she appears to be staring into my very soul, in reality she and her baton are conducting the band in the main room. This disconcerting sensory deprivation is augmented by the inability to communicate unless the talkback microphone is switched on between takes, something that is occasionally neglected when there is much else for engineer Matt to attend to. To be fair, as long as I can hear the click track through my headphones, the rest is mere frippery. We are booked for a four-hour session, to include a 20-minute break between episodes. Today there are 43 cues to record. I’ll do the maths for you - that’s little more than five minutes per item in which to run the music, discuss the interpretation with appropriate background info (��
