In 1990, my friend Terry asked me to record duets with him at Bias Recording Studio. That played a pivotal role, leading to establishment of TortoiseClimbing™ and its subsequent evolution of subsidiaries. All of what has occurred since for TortoiseClimbing™ may not have occurred without Terry's request for David to record duets with him.
(For your listening pleasure, included below are several streamable examples of duet and trio recordings made at that time. These were upgraded and remixed to TortoiseClimbing Audio's™ current quality standards.)
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 began the process of acquiring the skills for making quality recordings.
The early recordings provided hands-on experiences working in a professional recording studio. These 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, provided even more learning experiences about creation of recordings and their release. So, the journey began.
Terry previously 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 his availability became preempted by extended recording sessions for the then very popular Mary Chapin Carpenter albums. She was then recording at Bias because her then producer, John Jennings, was based at Bias.
(Mary Chapin would later switch to a Nashville, TN based producer, and move her record productions there.)
So, Terry and I switched to using the other partner involved in creation of Bias, namely Bill McElroy, for the rest of our recordings.
We are happy to share the following upgraded mp3 examples from the original, unreleased private recordings. They were upgraded by:
A few will be released shortly from our online audio Marketplace for sale and downloading in 1) audiophile formats, as well as 2) lossy formats, such as the ubiquitous mp3 and AAC, used by Apple for Itunes.
TortoiseClimbing Audio™ was able to perform these upgrades because:
The process of 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 for the wonderful opportuniies recording provides for being creative. Those experiences led me to record the album Solo Collection, released privately by TortoiseClimbing™ to friends and family in 1993.
Terry, after some years pursuing other things in life, has also returned to recording and is making numerous private recordings, also at SlippedDisc.
Inference: David's mother's idea for him to record the tribute album, Hymns and Song of My Mother, likely was influenced by the fact he'd:
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The samples below were selected by Terry from his wide interest in different musical styles. Three different styles of music are represented by the following 4 songs:
In about 1990, 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 focuses on capabilities we have within us that we can tap to achieve surprising things. In the musical Starlight Express, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, this powerful duet is sung 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, 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 Rusty 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 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.
This 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 the song "The Rose".
Our original version was recorded and rough mixed using the 3 parts from the sheet music. Years later, after converting the master tapes to digital and performing the post production tuning, during remixing and remastering, and David listened to the original recording by Bette Midler. He substantially re-imagined what he wanted in the re-mix, guided by:
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. 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.
Listen to the result.
This 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 it is 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 as part of releasing the private Solo Collection album in 1993. See Beginnings of TortoiseClimbing™.
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