“Such hard words were spoken but I won’t give up”
PTRN SKY!
Pete Francis
1. Can’t Get On With It
2. Scared Without Your Love
3. Brighter Days
4. PTRN SKY!
5. All Your Tears
6. Eyes of the Jungle
7. Fall Into Your Heart
8. Bring Me Some Water
9. Mind Over Mind
10. Wild Heart
Year: 2023
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"One of my favorite places to be is in a recording studio. It’s like being in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with all the beautiful glowing boxes, switches, and levers just waiting to be turned and activated. I had been on the other side of the glass, in the live room, waiting to hear the engineer’s famous words, “We’re rolling,” for countless recording sessions. When the pandemic hit, I wanted to learn how to engineer my own record. I am not a tech wizard, to say the least. Some might say I’m technically disabled. Ha!
But seriously, my work was cut out for me. In years past, I messed around with Pro Tools, even took a few Abelton tutorials, and finally landed on Logic. Logic felt intuitive, and I was lucky to work with a patient teacher - the pianist and composer Jason Wexler. Jason is like Spock - very smart, calm, and collected. He can figure anything out musically and with everything on the computer. It was SO cool to study engineering and production with Jason. Every week, I would begin a new song/composition inside a logic session, and over Zoom, we shared the screen, and he guided me through the recording/editing process.
This is how I produced, wrote, and recorded my album, PTRN SKY!. I treated drum loops like blank canvasses where I could play bass and experiment with chord progressions. Around this time, my love for synthesizers began to take hold. I bought a vintage Roland Juno 106 from Three Wave Music, a cool synth/keyboard shop in New Jersey. It is such an emotive synth. When I plugged it into my studio rig, the first sound of the instrument was this gorgeous pad. My song, “Brighter Days,” suddenly emerged, becoming the template for a handful of songs on the record. I was elated to learn about compression, EQ, reverb, delay, and all the plug-ins.
When I finished all the basic tracks, I reached out to producer/mixer/engineer Scott Jacoby or, as some call him, Obi-wan Jacoby. Scott is a sonic ninja. His ideas elevated the songs and took the production to a special place. My wife, Katie, created the artwork for the album. Her abstract heart captured a visual representation of the sounds on the record. Looking at the artwork is like staring up at the clouds in the sky and, for one fleeting moment, seeing something realistic in all the wild and undulating abstract shapes and colors. The heart ebbs and flows in and out of focus, weaving through the colors and shapes in the sky, just like the hypnotic grooves and dreamy textures of the synth, vocals, drum, and acoustic guitars." – Pete Francis