Make a Record(ing)

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my journey as a classical guitarist.

Twenty years! That seems like such a long time. More than two thirds of my life has been spent as a musician. As I've written before in my story about finding Jane and the Christmas Miracle, I gave up pursuing the path of becoming a performing, competing guitarist, but I've continued to develop my skills as a musician and music teacher. There have still been plenty of performance opportunities, thankfully, just not the touring and competition lifestyle that would have made it very difficult to be a wife and mother.

But recently I've found myself wistfully thinking that I would love to have the opportunity to share my favorite pieces of music with the world. My time will be more and more involved with homeschooling my wonderful daughter as she gets older, and we want to have more children in the future, so my time dedicated to music is going to increasingly decrease! Homeschooling is exactly what I want to do, so I'm very happy for that, but it would be so cool to make that secret dream of recording music to share with others come true.

To my delight, after a few months of pondering, asking opinions, and inquiring about options, I am excited to announce that I am hoping to record a solo CD in August this year!

This is a first for me. I've played hundreds of performances, performed on television multiple times, performed on the radio, and worked in recording studios, but have never made a solo album as a classical guitarist. I don't want to make a flashy impressive CD... I just want to record some old favorite pieces that I've played for years and several pieces that I've loved for a long time but only recently learned. Nothing fancy! I truly want to simply share what I love so much about the classical guitar: the beautiful music.

Right now I'm still in the planning stages. I need to solidify my set list, memorize all the music, arrange for graphic design, etc. My former university guitar teacher, the amazing John McClellan, will be my producer and has generously offered to guide me through the entire process of making an album, so that is a huge blessing! The biggest challenge will be raising the money to get the CD made! I will be using a Kickstarter campaign to fund the CD.

The second toughest part will be getting the time to practice and prepare all the music! I will need to have consistent practice time to make sure that I can play my pieces at their peak. That's why I want to record at the end of the summer, so I can have plenty of time to prepare :-)

Here we go on this next big adventure! Time to make a dream come true!

~ Prompt for March 5th: Make a record

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Participating in Write Alm's March prompts, daily words as guides for writing down what is in my head and heart. Entries might be long, might be short, might be posted here on the blog, or shared on my Instagram account. Do join me and others in sharing our thoughts with these prompts! I love seeing what you write.