Saturday, January 21, 2006

Anna


I'm so excited about the new song, "Anna" We originally recorded it about 2 weeks ago. The feel of it is awesome and it really moves. It only took a couple of takes before we got the drum tracks and the scratch guitar down. What you hear when you click on the link above is the original drum tracks, the final lead vocal(almost - there's one part that has to be fixed) and the rhythm guitar tracks. We recorded some percussion parts with a cabasa and a vibra-slap this past Tuesday but we're going to have work on that a bit more. Brandon is becoming a pretty good drummer but he needs a bit of work on percussion. He needs to loosen up a bit and understand that the percussion parts we need for this song are more of the punctuation variety. We'll probably use a shaker on the chorus instead of the cabasa. I'm going to start trying to work on the background vocals this weekend and finish the drum parts for "Smells Like".
Foo Fighters
It's getting towards the end of the month and I've got to start working on the newsletter for February. It will include articles on delay and phase shifting, recording lead vocals, new items from the winter NAMM and for the question portion we're going to examine how digital recording actually works. You can sign up to receive the newsletter by sending an email to signmeupplease@yourhomestudio.com

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Damn, where does the time go?

So much for posting every week. It's been 3 weeks since I posted but one of them doesn't count because I was out of town for a week and we didn't do much the week between Christmas and New Year's. Oh by the way, Happy New Year! We've been working on the lead vocal for "Too Late". Brandon engineered the session last Tuesday and I got to play producer. I have to say that I really prefer sitting back and listening vs working the board and trying to listen. Joel pretty much got everything except the bridge on Tuesday. The only thing we got done Thursday is the vocal on the bridge because we were sitting down in the den like we always do before practice and believe or not, we got sucked into Dancing with the Stars. I said something about mentally challenged people that cracked Joel up so bad he started crying. The bad part is that I don't remember what it was but it was no worse than something Carlos Mencia (My Hero) would say.
I'm still working on the drum tracks for "Smells Like". It's about 75% finished. It's not something you can do a little of at a time. I line up the snare and kick hits and then enter the midi notes to correspond with them for a couple of measures and then go back a bit and listen to them to make sure everything is cool. Sometimes you have to nudge the midi note a little before or after what he actually played to make it sound right. So as you can imagine, it takes about an hour or so to do 20 or 30 measures and the song is like 160 measures long. I'm going to be out of town this weekend but maybe I'll get a chance to do something with it when we get back Sunday evening.
You might want to check out the website and let me know what you think. I made some changes last weekend to the color scheme and layout. The newsletters are archived on their own page now. My wife thought the color scheme was a bit dull so we changed that. I'm going to give it another week or two to see if it makes a difference and if it doesn't I'm going back to the way it was.

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