Cameron Hissey
Cameron Hissey

A word of warning – take a good look at the picture above. NEVER have lunch with this person!! Your recording project will change forever ;-)))))

There are days that start out innocently enough, where you think nothing really exciting is going to happen, and then suddenly it ALL changes. Well, today was one of those days.

I had arranged to meet Cameron Hissey for lunch. It was just supposed to be lunch. We are virtually neighbors now, and besides that, I owed him a birthday present, so we thought we would meet at the local cafe here in downtown Croydon. Conversation invariably and predictably leads to things audio-related, and I was telling Cam about the great drum recording we did last night. He had already heard the songs, and liked them. I told him that my plan was to replace most of Jarrod’s programming with real instruments, and mentioned that I had violin players kind of lined up. He said that I would need to give them a score, as apparently classical musicians don’t do too well improvising. Well, the more Cam and I spoke (whilst drinking way too much coffee), the more he seemed to want to be involved. In the end he offered to make up a full score of the songs so that we could give them to real players as we found them.

So, straight after lunch I was back at Cam’s place giving him the MIDI files for him to begin working on the score.

This might not seem like much of big deal, but in hindsight, this day marked the turning point of the project from being a reasonably “normal” pop recording to a large monster – in a very good way!! Suddenly, there were all sorts of ideas coming out of this day, and the concept of recording everything from timpani, to cellos to piccolo trumpets, to a full choir, was basically born out of this day.

I had a nice lunch too.