In 1990 David's friend Terry asked him to record duets with him at Bias Recording Studio. That played a pivotal role in establishment of TortoiseClimbing™ in 1993. All that flowed since was facilitated/influenced by Terry's request for David to record duets with him.
Terry and David met when David began singing with the small ensemble Sentimental Journey. Its focus was on multi-part harmony songs from the 1940's. Their name came from the song "Sentimental Journey," which was very popular from that period.
The group started as an impromptu gathering of folks who liked to sing. Their 1st "performace" was a get together to sing 1940's music for themselves from the rooftop of a Federal building within sight of the Washington, DC mall on a 4th of July. That group evolved into the small singing group Sentimental Journey. (Terry and David joined after the group's initial July 4th "performance.")
In approximately 1990, while both were singing with Sentimental Journey, David was thinking about recording as a way to create something more lasting than performances. Turned out Terry had already begun recording at Bias Recording Studio and asked David to join him to record some duets.
So in 1990, Terry and David began recording duets at Bias Recording Studio in Springfield, VA for friends and family. That started the process of learning skills like how:
These skills, and more, are now used by Tortoiseclimbing Audio™ for making our quality recordings. Having the opportunity to learn these skills is a credit to the many engineerss, producers, artists who helped us along the way.
The early recordings provided hands-on experiences working in a professional recording studio. Those experiences recording with Terry and others, led David to undertake recording the solo album, Solo Collection, privately released in 1993 on cassette tape. Recording and preparing that 1st private album for distribution to friends and family, provided even more learning experiences about creation of recordings and their release. So, the journey began. (We have now learned that there is even more work required to make those early recording worthy of the quality to be publicly released.)
Terry initialy worked mostly with the Bias partner, Mr. Bob Dawson, with whom we recorded the first duet, "I Am the Starlight." However, shortly after making that recording with Bob, much of Bob's availability became preempted by extended recording sessions for the then very popular Mary Chapin Carpenter.
(At that time she was recording at Bias because her then producer, John Jennings, was based at Bias. Mary Chapin later switched to a Nashville, TN based producer, and moved her record productions there.)
So, Terry and I switched to using the other partner involved in establishing Bias, namely Bill McElroy, for the rest of our recordings.
After many years of Bill going off chasing Trains, and my pursuing my professional career, Bill and David are again working together at his new studio, SlippedDisc™ in Ashland, VA.
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The following mp3 advanced, interim release examples are partial upgrades of recordings from our back catalogue of unreleased private recordings to meet our current mission statement. They were upgraded by:
TortoiseClimbing Audio™ is able to perform these upgrades of previous recordings because:
Recording these duet and trio songs played an important part in our respective lives. Among others, it opened up an appreciation by Terry and I to the wonderful opportuniies recording provides to be creative. Those experiences led both of us to continue recording.
It is quite likely making of these recordings contributed to David's mother's idea for him to record the tribute album, Hymns and Song of My Mother. This is in addition to his having:
Here are several streamable previews of duet and trio recordings. Two of these are close to what will be released. The 2 Everly Brothers' numbers are vocally upgraded and preliminarily remixed to TortoiseClimbing Audio's™ standards. However, these examples still require replacement of the accompaniments and remix.
These songs were selected by Terry from his wide interest in different musical styles. The final versions will be made available as part of the Nostalgic Love Songs EP series. Three different styles of music are represented by the following 4 songs:
In order to capture the production feeling of the "Rock Broadway" musical number "I Am the Starlight", Terry worked with his producer and audio engineer Bob Dawson at Bias. They recorded multiple accompaniment tracks, using piano, synthesizer keyboard, drum machine and bass guitar. With Bob Dawson as engineer, we added our duet vocals. (While this song has somewhat of a Broadway style feel, it is referred to as a rock musical.)
This magnificant motivational song is from the musical Starlight Express, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe. This song focuses on capabilities we have within us that we can tap to achieve surprising things. It is a powerful duet, staged as a dramatic dream sequence between the young steam engine, Rusty, and the mythical Starlight Express. While Rusty has big dreams of winning the championship railroad race, the other engines and railroad cars think Rusty is not up to the task. In the musical, this dream sequence takes place in Act II after Rusty has been discouraged by all the other engines and rail cars. In this motivational pinnacle number, Starlight Express comes to Rusty's mind and exhorts him to use the power from somewhere deep inside, which makes anything possible.
After recording the dramatic inspirational "rock broadway" duet "I Am the Starlight", we recorded 2 simpler "Country Rock" productions of songs about young love that were made famous by the Everly brothers. These songs are somewhat iconic romantic expressions in a "Country Rock" style.
These 2 previews were recorded with karaoke accompaniments. Thus, they are only available for previewing from this website. (We are replacing the karaoke accompaniments with live band, real piano and synthesizer recordings. Those versions will be released as part of an EP in the Nostalgic Love Songs series for download from our online audio Marketplace, targeted for late 2026.)
This "Adult Soft Rock" song is in a ballad style. Because Terry and David were still singing with Sentimental Journey, we asked another member from Sentimental Journey, Karen Davis, to join us in recording a multipart arrangement of this song "The Rose".
This remix departs from the original mix, which used all 3 parts throughout, as on the sheet music arrangement we used. This remix example is modeled more after the studio release of the recording by Bette Midler. It:
Credits: Terry played all the guitar tracks on his guitars. The synthesizer keyboardist is unknown. (Note. Use of guitar departs from the original recording by Bette Midler, which prominently featured piano.)
The final version of this that will be released on an EP in the Nostalgic Love Songs series will replace the guitar accompaniment with piano, and will use some newer synthesizer orchestra parts. It will also include modifications to vocals like the effects on the final solo.
Karen Davis provided both the alto and descant parts, while David and Terry sang melody.
This is a simpler accompaniment production than on "I Am the Starlight," but more of a production than for the Everly brothers duets. As with all these songs, we had great fun creating this very different style of recording.
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Listen to the result.
This "Adult Soft Rock" song is in a ballad style. Because Terry and David were recording at Bias, we had the privilege of being joined on this hauntingly introspective song by the then newly hired wonderful engineer-producer-singer, Ms. Heidi-Gerber-Salins. (She would go on to be David's producer for Phase I of the Hymns and Songs of My Mother album, again contributing numerous duet vocals as part of hymns.)
Billy Joel wrote this song about a doomed relationship with model Elle Macpherson. Due to their 15-year age difference, their relationship was dramatic. In 1983, Macpherson was about 19 years old while Joel was around 34. The song was inspired or modeled after the Scottish ballad "Barbara Allen", and is unique for Joel as the lyrics are written in iambic tetrameter.
At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in 2024, when asked to name the definitive Billy Joel song, Joel said "And So It Goes."
Like Billy Joel's performances, where he dominantly uses only piano accompaniment, for this song we only added a simple synthsizer background part. This mix uses a relatively spare harmony arrangement where Ms. Gerber-Salin's alto part brings out the haunting pathos between the partners, more than a solo can.
Listen to the exquisitely haunting nature of this song.
TortoiseClimbing™ was created in 1993 as part of releasing the private Solo Collection album. See Beginnings of TortoiseClimbing™.
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