Preston's Loves

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P.S.

Pictures of the Week

This is what happens when Will dresses Preston for the day:

And this is what happens when Mom gets to choose the storytime book.

I didn't know it was a pig picture when I opened it up. Will told me that I was forever going to give our child a complex about his weight now. LOL.

Preston Hates the Violin.

It's true.

Our little 7 month old really hates that instrument.

I knew I should have practiced while I was pregnant. But nope. Piano concerts, piano lessons, piano practicing...all while he was in the womb with me. And he's been listening to the piano since day one after he was born. But completely devoid of the sound of the violin.

In fact, Preston knows what to do with a piano. He watches me play all of the time, and when I sit down with him on my lap he excitedly reaches out for the piano keys and starts pounding on them with his tiny fists.

But the violin? Yikes.

It all started a few weeks ago when we were in Yellowstone for Christmas...

I brought my violin, so I could help my niece, Mika, with her new violin that she got for Christmas.

Like I said, I hadn't really played in about a year. So Preston had never heard the violin before.

I kid you not, but this was Preston after I played for everyone.

At the time I thought it was funny and cute. "Maybe he just needs to get used to the sound of it" I said to Will.

Well, not so. He just plain dislikes it.

Aside from my 11 piano students, I now have one violin student, Chloe. She is 8 years old, very smart, and has a natural talent for the violin. Very easy to each and catches on really fast.

Today, as I was getting my violin tuned and warmed up before Chloe arrived for her lesson, I started playing some scales and a few songs to get my fingers warmed up. All of sudden Will and I hear Preston wailing from his crib (who, by the way, slept through ALL of my piano lessons today).

I stop. We look at each other and almost simultaneously say "He really does not like the violin."

So I'm simply convinced, either Preston really hates the violin, or I just really stink at playing it. LOL

Me 5 years old

7 years old

Playing in the 6th grade orchestra, as a 2nd grader

Will and I after my concert with the Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra

Album portraits

Just Another Normal Weekend at the Thomas House

My Mom and I worked more on our album...

Our living room was turned into a photography studio while Will got some portraits taken by my Dad (www.ronsouthworth.com) for his resume...

Pretty handsome, eh?

We went and bought Will a new suit (his first new suit in over 10 years)...

And then because it was strangely warm yesterday (55 degrees), we went to West Seattle and had a beach bonfire. But...it was a lot colder on the beach than at our house...

Driving across Lake Washington on the I-90 bridge to Seattle

Arriving at Alki Beach after just missing the sunset

Getting the little guy all bundled up...

Doesn't he remind you of the kid on "A Christmas Story"? Hahaha.

One happy (cold) family...

The End.

How Did I Get Here?

Tonight I sat in our running car in the grocery store parking lot with day-old makeup on my face, slippers (with no socks), my nursing bra only snapped on one side under a dirty shirt, a sleeping baby in the backseat...all while listening to Dalila on Seattle's Warm 106.9 soft favorites and waiting for Will (faithful husband, father, and movie-renter) to grab a free movie from the Red Box quiosk.

And the thought occured to me, "How did I get here?".

I suddenly thought back 5 years ago to when Will and I were dating, and I realized that there would be no way I would be caught sitting here with mascara dust under my eyes, a stinky shirt, sloppy bra, messy hair, and probably much more that I won't mention.

I probably would have had perfect makeup, perfect hair (most likely hot-rolled), wearing jeans that flattered my butt, a form fitting blouse that accentuated you-know-what, topped off with a few squirts of my favorite Ralph Lauren perfume Romance. I would be sitting there anxiously awaiting the first site of Will coming out of the store, knowing that it meant the long seperation of me waiting in the car and him in the store would soon end.

Oh my gosh. No. Actually, I'm wrong. I would have been in the store with him! Holding his hand, picking the movie out together, not wanting to miss one moment together.

And now here I sat, 5 years later, in the same car that we once made out in the backseat in the day I bought it, smelling like spit-up, feeling oh-so-flabbylicious with my 30 pounds of baby weight that I am still trying to shed.

I looked in the mirror and noticed, while looking past my sparkly wedding ring (the only classy thing about me today), that I hadn't really done my hair today. Ummm, I think I brushed it. Once. Maybe. What must my husband think of me??? It's Saturday right?

Just then Dalila interruped with her smooth radio voice and personality and she took a caller on the phone.

"And who is this?", Dalila asked.

"Cole." said he caller.

"And what can I do for you tonight?" Dalila asked in her famous s-l-o-w very enunciated almost sexy but warm voice.

"Well, " said Cole, "I'm sitting here having some bonding time with my new little son. My wife just gave birth to our first baby. I'm sitting here holding him and I am so in love.....so grateful...(you could hear the emotion in his voice). I just want to tell my wife that I love her SO SO SO much and I love our new little family."

And then as I blinked back tears because I always cry when I hear happy stories or sad commercials or movie trailers, it hit me.

Day old mascara = because instead of washing it off last night, my husband whisked me off to bed and then this morning he let me sleep in while he watched our little tyke.

Shoes but no socks = because Will wanted me to come rent a movie with him and I had no time for socks. Plus I hate socks. But that's not the point.

Extra 30 pounds = because my amazing body was healthy enough to make a tiny human and put my own needs aside and focus everything on doing that for 9 months.

Staying in the car instead of joining Will in the store = because my baby was sleeping in his carseat and he was too cute and too tired to wake up and bring inside.

Half-done-up nursing bra = I just provided a wholesome complete meal for my baby shortly before departing our house and forgot to snap my bra back up.

Dirty shirt = because part of that wholesome meal came back up.

Listening to "soft" romantic favorites = because hip hop, alternative, and punk just don't give me the positive warm fuzzy vibes that I like to feel while snuggly and sitting in a warm car at night with my sleeping baby. And besides, I like Dalila.

Sparkly diamond wedding ring on my finger = because that guy that I used to date and get all dolled up for I actually ended up marrying and couldn't have made a better decision in all my life.

And then, after realizing how I got here, I looked up to see my knight in shining armor running towards the car with a earband, jogging pants, a movie rental while exhaling steam into the freezing cold air because that's what he does. He lets me sit in the nice warm car while he battles the cold air and has no idea all of the huge long thought process I just went through and the amount of run-on sentences that would be a result of it in my next blog post.

Basically, all I really wanted to say is, I sure love that man. And...it's kinda obvious he loves me too.

Pictures of the Week

Does Preston remind you of someone else?

(above: Preston modeling his cool Hawaiin outfit that Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle James gave him for Chrismas from Hawaii)

Lullaby Album Sneak Peek

How An Album Is Made.

Dear Curious Folks,

I get lots of questions on the process of recording an album. Mostly from other curious future-music-album-recordees. But also from just plain curious folk. Since I am in the middle of recording my second album (a collab with my mom), I thought I would let you in on the secret of how it is done.



Prepare to be amazed. Or not.

The Creative Process

This is by far the most important part of the entire experience because this is where the actual "stuff" is thought up. And it takes the longest. Months, sometimes years. You can't force inspiration to come, so you have to wait for it.

Sometimes it comes in the middle of the night when you have no desire to get up and write it down so you forget it.


Sometimes it comes while taking long roadtrips so you sing your idea into your cellphone and send yourself a voicemail.


In the case of this lullaby album, sometimes inspiration comes while you are trying to get your little one to sleep. And you test out your ideas on him.

Sometimes what you think is inspiration is just a stupid idea when you go back the next day and listen to what you came up with.


This goes on for months, all the while you start compiling ideas on notation manuscript, notebooks, and snippet recordings on your 30-second keyboard recorder. You come back when you can and add to them until you have a full song.


Another part of the creative process is also figuring out the details of what is going on the album. How many songs? Is there a common theme? Are they all going to be original compositions, or are any arrangements? If there are arrangements, what sort of copyright laws apply to the song? Are mechanical licenses needed to be obtained for usage? How much money in royalties will need to be paid to the original composer?


Since our lullaby album is a collaboration, my mom and I decided that we would each contribute 6 songs each. Both originals, and arrangements. No co-written songs. Just 6 individual songs from each of us. We each have 1 song from our 6 that are songs written by other composers who are either still alive, or who have not been dead for 75 years yet. In other words, we must write to obtain permissions, and then pay royalties (8 cents per cd printed).


Most of the time, obtaining permission is going to be assumed a green light (because other composers like royalties), so we go ahead and write the arrangements and plan it for the album while waiting for the licenses.

Designing an Album Cover

If you are either rich, devoid of extra time, or talentless in the Photoshop department, it is best to hire someone to design your album cover for you.

We are none of those, so we decided to design our own cover and liner notes.

It helps to have an idea of what color scheme you want on the album. What sort of feeling do you want to portray by the cover image? Are you using art, or photography? Are you going to be in the photos? (If so that is a whole other ballgame...my last album I worked out every day for 4 months to get in shape for my cover photoshoot. I designed my own outfit and had my mother-in-law sew the skirt. It took 5 different photoshoots and two photographers to get ONE perfect covershot out of thousands of shots).

Fortunately for our lullaby album, we are using artwork. We wanted the cover to be clean. Simple. Obvious. Inviting. Classy.

We found our perfect album cover from an old painting hanging at my Grandparents' home. As you can see below, we had to take a digital picture of the painting (you can see the couch in the background), since we could not find any digital prints online of the painting.

We then uploaded the photo into Photoshop and edited it to perfection. Since it was a very old painting, we had to get rid of some cracks in the photo, as well as many speckles and chips. We also had to adjust the colors and contrast a bit, as well as crop the frame out of the photo. We ended up with what you see above on the computer screenshot (as well as our blog sidebar, top left).

Finding what fonts you want to use is also important because you don't necessarily want to use the standard fonts that come with your Word programs. So we both spent several hours searching online for the perfect font for the album title.

Text and liner notes are also important because you want to be sure you are accurate in your credits, copyrights, etc. And since my mom and I are using our own publishing companies for our copyrights, we have to be sure to state that on each song. As well as the name of any other publishing company. For example, I am contributing an arrangement of a Billy Joel song, so I have to state his publishing company on the album since they own the original copyright.

The Recording Process

So, everything that I've already talked about are things that my mom and I have been working on since last August.


Now that we have almost all of our songs composed (I am still finishing up one more), we are at the point where we are starting the recording process. The recording part doesn't take very much time at all (in the grand scheme of things), but it is obviously very important to do it right.


Recording in 2009 is not the same as it was in, say, 1975. Back then everything was analog and tapes. If you needed to edit your recording, you would have to take the tape off of the reel and cut it and paste it (literally). Thank goodness things are a lot easier nowdays with the way technology is. I mean, did you know that most movie soundtracks use digital technology and sounds? Musicians are losing their job because they are being replaced by advanced software.


This is how we do it:


I have a "home studio" which consists of two keyboards, a computer, and a few thousand dollars worth of fancy music software. All of which are investments that cut down the cost of recording in-studio in the long-run.


One of my most prized pieces of software is called Ivory (see below).

When I record a song, I play it from my keyboard which runs to my computer and records it in MIDI (musical instrument digital interface). Midi is basically 1's and 0's that the computer can read and run through any plug-in device you want and translate it to whatever instrument sound you have.

The sounds are called VST's (virtual studio technology).

Regular keyboards have a very small amount of memory and therefore the sounds used inside are looped. That is why you can hear an obvious difference between a real piano and a digital keyboard. It is taking a small sample of a real piano sound and looping it over and over...which in the end makes for a pretty fake sounding piano sound.

With my Ivory software, because it has such a vast library of sound (15 DVDs of information that I had to load onto our computer. That was DVDs, not cds by the way), it actually does have the capability to produce a "real" piano sound. Engineers took a Steinway, Bosendorfer, Fazioli, and Yamaha grand pianos - put them in a studio - and precisely recorded each and every note for their full duration (no looping whatsoever) at 12 different velocity levels (meaning pppp, ppp, pp, p, f, ff, fff, ffff, etc...).

So when we record a song, it records as MIDI, then is run through Ivory and translated into my choice of piano. I personally like the Steinway German D 9 foot concert grand. :)

We do multiple takes until we get the best possible recording. If you make a mistake while recording, you can either "punch in" in the middle of the song and re-record a section, or you can fix it in the after-edit. I personally feel it is more important to get the best emotion into a song rather than the right notes.



I turn down the lights and pour my heart out when I record. If I make a mistake, I keep going and then fix it in the after-edit.



Being able to record this way from home literally saves us thousands of dollars in professional studio time. For example, a good friend of mine just released another solo piano album. It is beautiful, and she did the entire thing in-studio on a 7 foot Yamaha with mics and the whole bit. About a week after she got her master recording back from the studio, she noticed she played a wrong note in one of her songs. Just to fix the ONE note, the studio was going to charge her almost $300.



After the initial piano scores are recorded, then comes time to edit. Bring on the looooong hours of computer time.

You want as pristine of a recording as possible because once you send your master copy off for replication, there are no re-do's. If you've got mistakes in there, well, you will get to hear it every single time you play the CD. I will listen to a song over and over, and then have others listen to it (so I can have another set of ears) to "proofread" a song. I want it perfect. Mistakes are for live performances, not for recordings. :)

Once we are finished with all of the home studio recordings, we then take all of our files and head into a professional studio. As you can see, Dextor is our studio engineer (my faithful sound engineer, Zak Dewey's beagle).

If there is any audio that needs to be recorded, we do that in the professional studio in soundbooths with awesome mics.

After all digital and audio tracks are finalized, then we mix. Mixing is just taking all of the different tracks and finding the right volume levels for everything. For example, you don't want the background strings to overpower the piano, so you mix and adjust things until it is just right.

Zak has us listen to everything on 3 different levels of speakers. 5" "ghetto blaster" speakers (which is what most people actually listen to music on), 8", and then my favorite the 10" HUGE speakers that make any and all music sound great. The reason for all of this is because sometimes you have to go back and adjust the mix until it sounds pretty even on all three sets of speakers.

After the mixing is complete (which can take several days), then Zak masters everything. Mastering should be called magic. It takes any notes that stick out and compresses them down. The piano is actually one of the hardest instruments to master because it has such a broad range of notes and dynamic levels. You don't want those high notes to peak out and hurt your ear drum, but you also don't want to back too much off so the bass still resonates. It's tricky.

CD Production

Once you are completely finished with the recording process and have everything mixed, mastered, and you have a final master copy of your album in your hand...you can begin the production process.



Sigh.



Last time this was quite stressful for me. Hopefully this time it will go much smoother.



We use a CD production company called Disc Makers. They are back East in New Jersey. But they have an office here in Seattle. We basically take our Master copy, our CD cover artwork files, font files, text files, and give it to their rep here in Seattle. She reviews it to make sure she has everything, and then ships it back east.



We then are assigned our own personal account manager who oversees the entire project from start to finish. Lots of emails. Lots of phonecalls. Lots of FedEx deliveries. Lots of everything until it is proofed and approved by us.

Once it is approved, they make a glass plate copy of your cd and then replicate it according to however many you ordered. Then UPS shows up at your door about 2 weeks later with 20 huge heavy boxes of cds that sort of look like this:

Once you get your boxes, then you have to worry about selling them. :)

The Sheet Music Process

This is something that I am actually still working on from my first album: getting all of my songs into sheetmusic for sales. I get sooooo many requests for sheet music it's not even funny. I have a standard response that I send out that says something along the lines of "I'm working on it, check back later." LOL

I use a program called Finale. With this software you can either use MIDI again to play your songs from the keyboard into the Finale program and it translates it into sheetmusic for you (which never comes out right), or you can enter every note manually by hand. Which is what I do.

So I take pages of scribbles like this...

And turn it into printed organized readable copies like this:

And this:

If you even made it this far, congratulations. That was by far one of the longest blog posts I've written on here.

Anyway, so that's it. After this entire process is done, you have a CD that you spend the next however-many years marketing. Creating a website, finding distributors, licensing opportunities, booking concerts and gigs, etc....I have to say the marketing of everything is even more work. It is never ending. It is a daily thing. You set goals of trying to do one thing everyday to market your album.

So anyway. That's all folks!

Weekend in Review.

My Mom and I spent all day Friday recording lullabies for our album.
Will ran a 50K race on Saturday in the mud and finished in 6 hours.
We bought our first popcorn popper.
Preston had several diaper blowouts and peed all over himself and the wall right as we were about to leave for church today.
Will threw his neck out of place and is in a lot of pain right as we were about to leave for church.
And again, right as we were about to leave for church, Will found a huge 4 inch hole in the crotch of his suit pants.
We were 30 min late for church after having to bathe Preston and Will changing his clothes.
Our bishopric gave us three Fred Meyer giftcards to help out with the unemployment situation.

We are so blessed.

Crazy Northwest Weather

I've always felt rather fortunate to live in the Northwest because we don't have to deal with hurricanes, earthquakes (at least not too often), or sub-zero temperatures. Or scorpians, cockroaches, or really big insects. I just had to add that too.

However, we do have our faults. We have volcanoes, lots of rain, and we totally could have a tsunami or tidal waves. Those are all very uncommon though.

What we DO deal with every winter is extreme windstorms and flooding.

I thought it would be interesting to show you Snoqualmie Falls, which is about 10 miles from our house.

This is how Snoqualmie falls normally looks:

And then this is what it has looked like this past week due to massive record-breaking flooding:

This picture is of the lookout cabana. The falls was definitely an exciting thing to see with all of the powerful water rushing over it this past week. You can also see the mist rising up from the falls.

This picture is looking up at the falls.

Snoqualmie River was 8 feet above flood levels a couple of days ago. It broke all records.

Luckily we live on a hill and so we were not effected by the flooding.

This last picture is of Snoqualmie Pass and how it normally looks during ski season.

If you remember my recent blog post about our roadtrip ("Car Perspective"), the pictures at the end with all of the snow and trees was Snoqualmie Pass. It is about 45 miles outside of Seattle and on our way home.

Due to the high temperatures and melting snow, this is what happened a few days ago at the ski resort:

A huge mudslide avalanche. It knocked out a lot of the cabins, and destroyed some the ski resort.

The pass was closed for several days. A lot of people were stuck on either side of the mountains due to this. I-90 is the major connecting highway between Seattle and the eastside of the state.

All of this was caused due to heavy snowfall between Dec. 19th - Jan. 1st. Then between Jan. 5 - 8th tempertures went up to around 50 degrees or higher, thus causing much of the snow to melt in the mountains.

It's been crazy wet here. It all reminds me of a primary song...

The wise man built his house upon the rock
The wise man built his house upon the rock
The wise man built his house upon the rock
And the rain came tumbling down

Oh, the rain came down
And the floods came up
The rain came down
And the floods came up
The rain came down
And the floods came up
And the house on the rock stood firm.

The foolish man built his house upon the sand
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
And the rain came tumbling down

Oh, the rain came down
And the floods came up
The rain came down
And the floods came up
The rain came down
And the floods came up
And the foolish man's house went "splat!"

Although, if you live in Washington, if you build your house upon the rock, a big avalanche could knock it out. LOL

Christmas Vacation Top Ten CountDown!

Well, as everyone else probably did, we took a TON of photos over Christmas. I didn't want to write a travel log and bore you all, and so I thought the easiest way to do this was to pick our favorite 10 things about our Christmas holiday.

So I broke everything up into 10 different posts. If any of you find pictures of yourselves that you want the full original sized version of, just leave me a comment and I'll email it to you.

All pictures are clickable to enlarge.

Enjoy!

P.S. Oh, and we have our blog set up to only show 5 posts per page, so when you get to the bottom you have to click "older posts" to see more.

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #10

Number 10: Leaving reality for a while and entering a winter wonderland of fun.

By the way, thanks Kristi for taking these next photos...

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #9

Number 9: Playing in the snow.

Will's knee-deep snow angel was a personal favorite of mine!

Will also went skiing with Mark at Sundance, though no pictures were taken since I had the camera. :) Sorry Will.

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #8

Number 8 - The Christmas Lights at Temple Square

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - No 7 - Watching Preston Jump Himself to Sleep

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #6

Number 6: Plenty of time for Mommy-Baby Self Portraits.

Of course it takes that many tries to finally get the little guy to look at the camera. :)

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #5

Number 5 - Father-Son time.

Isn't that the most precious picture you've seen? Preston watching his Dad get ready in the mirror and admiring him. Ahhh. Makes my heart go pitter-patter.

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #4

Number 4 - Being the "Mama-razzi".

This one's for the grandparents.

Click on any to enlarge.

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #3

Number 3: Visiting Friends.

Thank you Lori-ann and Rob for the WONDERFUL dinner and Will says thanks for the Wii golf tournament. :)

LOL...I took this one at Michele's house.

Michele & Stanley...thank you for having us, and for the scrumptious New Years Eve dinner, and the fun time at Temple Square!

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #2

Number 2: Watching Preston enjoy his first Christmas morning.

Christmas Vacation Top 10 Countdown - #1

Number 1: Spending time with family.

We spent a week in West Yellowstone, where Will's parents reserved three timeshare condos for the entire family. Almost everyone was able to make it out of Will's nine other siblings. The picture above is not even everyone that was there. It was a lot of fun to just relax and hang out with everyone.

Then we traveled down to Utah, where we got to see my brother Mike and his family (although we didn't snap any pictures unfortunately).

Then we stayed two nights at my Aunt and Uncle's home in Pleasant Grove.

Then we stayed two nights at Mark and Laura's house (Will's sister) where we ate pizza and watched movies, and Preston got to play some more with cousin Jace.

We wanted to spend more time visiting G&G Southworth, but they both were really sick and didn't want to give it to Preston. So we just stopped by for a quck visit on the front porch - long enough to chat, snap some photos, and not spread germs. :)

On our way home we stayed with G&G Lindsay in Pendleton, Oregon

It was really special to get to squeeze in so many visits this trip.

Car Perspective.

If there is anything that we have realized from driving from Washington, to Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Montana...

Is that we love the Northwest.

The snow in Yellowstone was beautiful, and the family and friends in Idaho and Utah were awesome....

But nothing compares to the greenery, the trees, and the beauty of our backyard right here in the Northwest. We were so excited to finally get back home.

Here is a little glimpse of our roadtrip from our perspective sitting in the front seat of our car.

(Thanks Kristi for the 2 pictures above)

(our car, after sitting in Yellowstone for 5 days)

We are now starting to head over the Cascade Mountains, afterwhich will land us back into Seattle.

Ahhh....

Our tiny town...

The pictures of everything that happened in between these drives to come soon.

Home at Last

We're home...after a 2 week vacation and a lot of driving. We are excited to sleep in our own bed tonight, and have our baby sleep in his own room. lol.

Oh there will be blogging. Lots of it.

But first, unpacking, laundry, opening mail, etc.....