This blog is part 8 in an ongoing series. If you missed it, jump back to Part 7 now.

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The next day I was invited out to the studio to hop on another session. The producer needed a guitar player and wanted me to come out for it. I was dealing with a lot that week in particular and was currently wearing a heart rate monitor as part of a series of tests I was taking after I’d had some scary experiences where my heart rate flared up, but I absolutely never want to turn down an opportunity to play on someone elses work – I’m actively looking for more of these types of opportunities to better myself as a player (don’t be shy!). So, I agreed to come out and was excited that he’d asked. Maybe it would lead to more session work if I did well enough. Also, it paid a little, and on top of it all I’d just suddenly lost the job that I had quit my otherwise stable full-time job for. Life’s been a bit of a rollercoaster lately.

When I arrived to the studio there was a woman sort of milling around the main floor of the building as though she was waiting for something, the same way I sort of mindlessly stand around when I’m a little earlier for an appointment than I want to be. After I got upstairs to the door, she appeared behind me. “Oh, I suppose we’re going to the same place,” I said, realizing that she had the same funny anxiety about being early as I did and knew that I must be the guitar player the producer told her would be coming.

That session went alright, but it again wasn’t really what I expected. The artist I’d met at the door was beginning to work with on some of her original music with the producer and they were building a song from the lyrics first, like I often do.

The producer asked that I bring my acoustic guitar, so I was surprised that when the song began to play, it already had some acoustic guitar on it that seemed to be pretty essential to the song. I thought he must want me to learn that part and play it a little cleaner or something, cause the track was a little roughly recorded, for sure. Maybe that was the plan and maybe it wasn’t, but it didn’t really matter because about as soon as we all settled in, the vocalist/songwriter wanted to work through her melody some more because she wasn’t sure about a few things. So while she hopped in the booth to do that, I tried to use the time to learn the acoustic guitar part in a non-disruptive way, but I was unsure still if that’s why I was there. In any case it was a great opportunity to learn a track by ear and remind myself that I can do that – I don’t set aside enough time to work on that skill as I probably should.

Eventually a moment opened up where I was able to ask what the goal was for the guitar and if the one I was hearing on the track was the part I needed to play. The producer explained he thought I could come up with something else instead to layer on top of it. There didn’t feel (to me) to be a ton of room for much additional stuff acoustic-guitar wise with everything else going on in the track, but I was down for the challenge.

Unfortunately, it was at about this time that the vocalist was done what she wanted to try and the producer was calling the session early as we often did with mine. Nonetheless, I was happy to have been invited out, enjoyed the song they were working on and thought I might be useful when they were ready to add more, or perhaps for some of their other songs. 

I was also happy that when I sent out my invoice the next day per the producers request, he paid it promptly. Not everyone is great about that and I appreciated how quick he was to take care of it. It felt weird, I admit, given that I didn’t actually record anything, but I don’t want to devalue my time to come out at his request, either, and I suspected I’d be back to actually finish the recording at some point. 

Things may have been going wonky with my own song, but at least I was getting some other music work out of the arrangement. Things were looking, slightly up. 

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Okay, we’ll get back to the main story in just a brief moment.