Studio Update: A Little Detour

This week’s update is a little bit of a detour around the usual subject (the new album) because I took a bit of a detour myself in the studio. In other words, I haven’t really been working on the new album this week. I have been working in the studio, though.

If you’re a songwriter, one of the coolest things that can happen to you is for someone else (preferably someone more famous than you are) to cover one of your songs on their CD. Just under a year ago, this happened to me.

One of the biggest influences on my musical career has been The Acappella Company, the parent company of such artists as Acappella, AVB, The Vocal Union, and Acappella’s founder, Keith Lancaster. The latest group to emerge from The Acappella Company is a group called Durant, which features 3 of Keith’s children: Melissa, Kim, and Anthony Lancaster. Last year, when they released their debut album, Ride, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they had recorded a version of “How Great”, one of my older songs!

As a result, God has blessed me with a lot of exposure over the past year, as Durant have been touring as an opening act for Acappella and singing my song all over the world! I have been receiving lots of email about the song from people who weren’t familiar with my music before, which is really exciting!

One subject that keeps coming up over and over again in the emails that I have been getting is sheet music. It seems that people want to be able to sing the song themselves, but they aren’t able to figure out the right way to sing it. Therefore, this week I have been busy putting together sheet music for “How Great”, along with a few other tunes, which will be available as downloadable .PDF files from my website real soon.

There’s something really fascinating to me about sheet music. It’s amazing to me how powerful a bunch of little black dots on a piece of paper can be. There is something almost sacred about putting a song in this form because when I’m orchestrating a song, I feel like I’m walking along the same path as the great composers and hymn writers of ages past. It’s really cool to think that people like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Isaac Watts used these same little dots to express themselves musically. How cool is that?

Anyway, hopefully I can get back to the recording next week. I’ll be sure to let you know.

God Bless!

--Eric G.