Hi everyone,
First off, a massive THANK YOU for your incredible support! Your feedback, encouragement, and album pre-orders (double wow!) have truly blown us away. It’s been a humbling and inspiring journey for all of us here at Charlie Tango HQ.
A Milestone Achieved!
The end of February proved to be special in that we finally finished the recording process for our new album, Life in the Sky. This consisted of a final recording session providing the finishing touches on some backing vocals. The next stage is editing, mixing, and mastering, or in other words, taking all of the ingredients and baking the cake!
And you might have guessed it, it’s at least as finicky a process as trying to serve up the best cake on the planet!
Below is a photo of Olivia Marie singing on our big ballad, Time That Stood Between Us. For the music nerds, the microphone is a Neumann U87, recognised as one of the best and most high end mics in the recording world.
How We Make the Music
Writing music is an intimate, personal, and sometimes unpredictable process. For The Charlie Tango Project, a song can start in countless ways, sometimes with a lyric, an idea, a drumbeat, or a guitar riff. That first spark can literally come from anywhere.
But crafting a song is rarely as simple as inspiration striking like lightning. It’s more like sculpting—starting with a raw block of sound and chipping away, refining, shaping until we uncover the final vision. The old saying about music being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration? It’s absolutely true!
To illustrate, below is a short clip of Phill working on a synth sound. He is doing this digitally, however back in the 70's and 80's this would have been done by using hardware with cables, dials and all manner of tactile electrical wizardry.
Singing in the Shower? Yep, That Happens, But What About Recording?
These days, smartphones are (thankfully) waterproof, and their built-in voice recorders have become invaluable tools. Case in point: the intro to our song “See You Again” was born when CC hummed the melody into his phone… mid-shower. Because here’s the thing—when an idea hits, you’ve got to capture it before it disappears!
The Magic of Collaboration
We've touched on baking and sculpture but writing music is also a lot like painting a picture. Which colours do you use? Should the lines be bold or subtle? Is the vibe abstract, surreal, or contemporary?
Are we baking, chiselling or drawing with crayons? Some days I think we are just eating the crayons!
Having limitless creative choices can be both a blessing and a challenge.
That’s where collaboration comes in. Bringing in other musicians adds fresh perspectives, new textures, and unexpected twists that can take a song to places we never imagined. And that’s what makes this process so rewarding.
Click on the photo below to watch a short clip of our keyboard player, The Gaz, laying down some sweet organ sounds for the song, “See You Again.”
We can’t wait for you to hear what we’ve been working on! Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to releasing our debut album Life in the Sky.
Thanks again for being part of this journey, we couldn’t do it without you. Please feel free to share and recommend.
Click here to preorder your digital copy of the album or to simply take a wander through the official band website.
Till next time…
CC & Phill
The Charlie Tango Project
