WEEK 2 (of recording, not in actual time that has passed)
crap. we got sidetracked with shows, jobs, the summertime, and an extreme case of laziness. here is what happened; as mentioned in the previous post we did start recording a song (stands in shoes), probably the song that would start our record off, but after recording it and doing a rough mix it was deemed as fragmented, basically because it sounded like it was recorded in four different parts. ANNNNNNNDDDDDD...IT WAS!!! so, we dumped it and last thursday, may 22nd we reformed in our mansion to start fresh. we invited our friends rob taylor and steve kruger over to play on a song titled "mothersun". the song is super minimal with a focus on the lyrics, simple melody and "primitive" acoustic instrumentation, i.e. fiddle, banjo, acoustic guitars, stompz, and lots of hollering. three cardioid pattern condenser mics were setup in a room and the song was played and recorded completely live, a naked gods first!
live is the approach that we have decided to take in recording these songs. since "stands in shoes" was so fragmented sounding we pulled our resources together and found enough microphones to do all the initial tracking as live as possible. guitars have been overdubbed in certain parts, so have vocals, and extra percussion where needed, but so far the core of the songs is being performed live. the process is also much quicker! in four days we have completed almost five songs, half of our intented ten song LP. the songs pretty much completed are "mothersun", "wokka wokka", "growing ground", "rick danko was an honest man", and a song with the working title of "majestic dude monkeys (something about elephant lungs)". the songs left to record are "blah blah blah", a reworking of "five more years", the dreaded "stands in shoes", a reworking of "joel is a puss", and a song that we havent written yet. there is some serious work to be done. in the next few posts i want to talk about the remaining songs to be recorded and the versions we come up with, album art, tracklistings and tons of other headache inducing and extremely fun things in store for us. ultimately, we are happy with the way things are turning out, and feel that every song possesses something special that allows for repeated listens. one luv, boom-town, boone-town rise upwards.
PS we dont even have an album title, but maybe it is bad luck to name something before its finished. "chinese democracy" here we come!!
A FEW PICTURES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
WEEK 1
hello everyone. hope youre having a lovely day. we're doing alright. we have created this space to serve as a online documentation of what we have been doing as far as recording our new "owl-bum" is concerned.
well, for this first week we have started on a song titled "stands in shoes", and it has so far proved to be much more complex than the songs on our last EP. we have tracked drums, bass guitar, seth's acoustic gtr, christian's electric gtr, a few vocals, plus some noise and stuff. its coming along nicely.
we have also been experimenting with recording techinques. speakers and microphones are essentially transducers, they take energy and convert it into audio signals. knowing this we have been using speakers as sort of a "reverse" transducer for our purposes, using them to record bass gtr and vocals. the results have been interesting for the bass gtr, providing thick, low end response and a sort of "meaty" sound that supplements the B-1 Behringer used to directly mic the bass cabinet.
we will see you next week! here are some pics: