Michael, thanks for posting this. It was an honor to work on this song. What a unique take on the subject, from the point of view of a church building, but it's a metaphor for the church itself.
The choir is seven of us, Sandi Kaye, her daughter Cassie, Paul Sparks, Jay Shupe, Beth Travers, Dave Signs and me, we are all part of the "OK Chorale" at Nashville Cowboy Church. We cut the choir at Studio 215, Dave Signs' studio. This is eight tracks of us singing different parts.
The fiddles are by Drew Covington. I played twelve string guitar, five tracks of six string acoustic guitar, keyboard harp, organ, programmed cymbals, live percussion, mandolin, upright bass and programmed orchestra.
The handclaps were eight tracks of me clapping, quadrupled and then processed with an impulse response reverb. The impulse response is an interesting process. There is an impulse, either a blank gunshot, a ceramic hammer hitting a woodblock or a similar impulse, that is done at various locations and recorded with high end equipment. That impulse is then loaded into a program that uses it to put the reverb and ambience of that environment on a track. In this case, it is from a church in Schellingwode Germany. So the reverb is as if the handlaps were in that church LOL. I've got a collection of impulse responses from around the world and from different environments. Once we used an impulse response from inside a volkswagon van to create an environment that sounded like the singer was talking on the radio in a small twin-engine plane. Fun Stuff.
Thanks Tom, I like "big" tracks to still sound "open." Too often big tracks sound like either a lot of things have been squeezed into a medium sized room, or that things are happening in different rooms. I try to get things to sound like some folks are close and some further away in a large space. I find you can't just put the same reverb on everything. That's not the way things hit my ears in church.
Thanks all and, of course, thank God. Without Him, we would not have "The Church."