how to stink up a room...

Why that title? well, lets just say i wish there was a way to transmit smells over the interweb here. like some sort of html tag in which you could embed odor to make a smell come out of the speakers of someone's computer. That way you could get a taste (almost literally) of what our little iso booth was like after last night's tracking. We had Steph singing (who had copious amoust of garlic at some point during the day), Michelle singing (she smelled fine), Christian singing; and when i say singing, i mean farting with a bit of singing in between, and Blue (Rob) playing trumpet after coming directly from working at Panerra, smelling like garbage (but in a good way).
We spent most of the night tracking vocals for "My Faith Looks Up". Here's a shot of Christian warming up. Notice the Mustache left over from Mustache Week at ORB. I'm pretty sure that it helped him nail some pretty sweet lines.


Tim looks on (with a mustache of course). Shouldn't he be running a bowling alley right about now?


So here's a clip of Cwis getting into it - i'm telling you the mustache really helps!:


Steph and her friend Alex check out the action from the back of the control room. Notice the piles of crap everywhere. What a mess. We need an intern to clean up and do the other stuff that i don't want to do. Anyone interested please contact me at pete (at ) jerkrecords (dot) com. Be aware that the job will be thankless, low pay (that means no pay really), and you will learn just a little bit about how to make mediocre sounding recordings.


And Now..... the Action:


Michelle gets serious for her parts. Very Serious.


Here's Blue getting his tooter ready for some tracks on "Savior of my Soul":


Tim and I get one of the MANY amps (that have been left at the studio by other people) ready for some overdubs. Sshhhh... don't tell.


Christian gets one of his overdub lines together. How does he do it? See clip:


How did it turn out?


Once again Tom Sasso took all the pics and vids. Good job my man. It's funny - i told him that shorter clips are better for the blog here than real long ones, so when i got the camera back this morning and looked at all vids, most of them were like 2 or 3 seconds long and totally unusable. I guess that's what i asked for. Here's the man:


OK - only a few more tunes needs vocals and then it's on to heavy mixing/editting.
until next week -

Steph Goes to Work

Last night's session was vocals with Steph. We had a small group in the studio which is always more productive, cause you don't have to yell "shut up!" constantly to 6 people directly behind you kabitzing while you're trying to hear the subtleties between microphones and preamps when picking equipment to match with different people's voices. Tom Sasso was there popping pictures and vids again, so here's what he saw:

Steph in the booth getting ready.


Here's steph doing a line from "Life is So Bright". (The audio on this is a bit quiet because you're hearing everthing from outside the glass, so turn up your speakerz). From that look she shot Tom, i don't think she was all to keen on this take. Don't worry Steph, DO IT AGAIN!


LittleHale was present to provide motivation and "Nerd Kicking" as neccessary.

We finished up with Steph's parts pretty quickly, so while we waited for Christian to show up i did a few taborine and backup vocal parts. This is were i get to run the session (for the most part) from that little remote control dealie i mentioned a few posts back. Very useful. Still, you need someone sitting behind the desk telling you that your performance sucked, so....


Steph took the controls. Good Job! You get a Food Pellet. (and an album credit).


Here I am in the box furiously shaking my tambo. We didn't have a camera fast enough to catch the action, hence the unavoidable blurriness of this shot.

After Christian showed up, we put a couple small parts of his down for "Faith Looks Up" and talked about how we wanted the vocal for that song to be structured. That song will end up quite different from the way it is played at the ORB... hopefully you'll like it. That was about all we did... the next session hopefully will be thursday morning, then the next monday again. We are getting closer though: a couple acoustic tracks, and a few lead vocal tracks to go and pretty much all of the tracking will be done. Then it's on to mixing. Ugh.

until next time...

Two posts in one day!?!

Well, i actually just recorded some drum work and figured i'd put the clip up that Sandi shot. I had this crazy idea of getting a drum loop recorded by playing along to a very sped up clip of "faith looks up", then playing my recorded drum segment back at normal speed. If you did this with magnetic tape it would just sound like real low and mushy drums. But in this case i wanted a real grainy, digitally streched sound, so i used this fancy digital looper thingy that i use when i do the space-terror-rock-jazz-thing with The Big Mechanical Bull. When you dial back the tempo on recorded drums, they sound really cool and techno. Or something like that. Here's a clip of me recording on my son Sammy's vintage Stewart and Ludwig orange sparkle set carefully wedged in the corner of his room. Check out the decor.


later nits -

That's all we did??

OK, monday's regular session was postponed because i had another job i had to get done, so Christian and Tim did some work by themselves on tuesday afternoon while i was at my other job (you know, the one that actually provides me with a constant paycheck so that i can feed the familly and pay the mortgage). On one hand, sessions like these are a bit sketchy, because i am not there to "oversee" the production and provide artistic direction - not that these guys aren't capable of doing great things; they are! but you never know whats going to happen. For example, a totally ridiculous synth part may be commited to a track, or a vocal may be done with the microphone facing the wrong direction (this has happened before and i wont mention names) or soda may be spilled into something important. On the other hand, i love walking in at the end of the day to see all the fantastic work that has been accomplished without me having to be chained to the console all night.
Well, tuesday's work didn't really fall into either category. Tim and Christian were set up to do acoustic and electric guitars, vocals, and pretty much anything else except drums and bass - which i usually handle anyway. They had 3 or 4 songs to get overdubs done on, so i was sure that large chucks of the work would be knocked off.
Not Quite.
When i came home they played me "Life is So Bright" which they had been working on for 3 hours or so. The result? A synth track, an acoustic track, and a track of electic guitar - actually, they didn't get that because the amp was flipping out and had to be swapped. As i listened to the stuff they had (which was really cool for sure) Christian just kept saying "i can't believe this is all we did!".
I figured i'd take some shots of them while they were doing some electrics...
Tim is playing the old Million Time Winner Les Paul. It is as heavy as a bag of concrete.


Here's a stirring shot of micrphones pointed at a speaker.
Wow.


This little video clip pretty much sums up how i found these two "working" when i got there. I wonder why so little got done?


I want to get this project done in January, but there's pretty much no way in the world that's going to happen. There is so much to do still - i feel like i will be editting every night from 11 PM on for the next month. Next session i hope to knock off at least 1 vocal track, so hopefully we'll get some shots of the ladies singing instead of christian acting like a lunatic. Although that is always worth not getting some work done!

until next week...

Small Update

Hi again.
Real quick before i begin: i know the videos on the last blog were not showing up correctly. I am looking into that and will fix it. Keep checking back daily. They will show up eventually.
Last night was a lighter night as far as attendance goes, as Sandy was having a super meeting upstairs with all kinds of MOPS women. That's mothers of pre-schoolers for those not in the know. It's a christian women's support type group for moms with little kids. they meet at our place once in a while to plan their yearly curriculum or something. I think they were up there having a raging kegger or playing poker. Anyway - they needed it a bit more quiet, so no loud amps or drums for this night. Also, no waves of ORB recording types coming up and down in and out of the studio rummaging through the fridge and my snack cabinets. So, in attendance were only Christian and Michelle. Before the Ladies Upstairs all showed up, i was able to do a drum track for My Faith Looks Up, which is what we were going to try to work on for the session. Here's what the drumset looked like with microphones of all sorts pointed at it:


I got a new toy for the studio and i am loving it. Usually my new toys are really expensive things that do things like "make the microphone louder" or "make that signal quieter and then louder". But this one everyone else in the session gets a kick out of.

This thing is a wireless remote control for the computer recording system. It lets me start and stop playback, add new tracks or takes, rewind, fast forward, undo, save, etc etc. from anywhere in my studio. Very Cool. It's great for thos who do a lot of recording on their own. For me, often when i record drum parts, i'm in the control room pressing "record", then booking it through the amp room into the drum isolation booth, hopefully in time to start playing. If i screw up, i need to run back and undo, rewind, and start again. For our session last night, i used this for recording Christian doing electric guitar overdubs while totally relaxing in my chair not hunched over the console.


Here's a short video clip of Christian writing guitar lines while sitting on the control room floor. Check out the sweater he's rocking.



We got most of the foundation tracks of this song done, so it's on to vocals next. Michelle worked on her homework while we fiddled around with the knobs and whatnot:


Thats about it for today. Next session is thursday morning with Christian again. See you then!

happy new yearz.


today we have the first ever photo and video update. Monday's session was attended by myself, christian, michelle, jeff, tim, and tom sasso. Matt Littlehale strolled in at one point too. The night's objective was to get some support acoustic guitar tracks and vocals done. Tim and I started before everyone arrived and got a good chunck of Fairest Lord Jesus completed, with him and i both recording guitar parts.
Then things slowly ground to a halt as the rest of the crew showed up. I gave the digital camera to the peanut gallery while we tracked and here's what it came back with.

Tim and I discuss the finer points of music making.


Christian Arrives.



Pre-production starts. This is where we talk about how we want a song or partsof a song to sound like and who's going to play what. Here's a video of
the intricacies of such a discussion.





Hi Michelle. Poor girl - she teaches unruly kids all day and then spends
her night with us.



The boys look on as christian tracks acoustic guitars.




In the Hot Box recording something. I can't remember what though.





Jeff was going to sing a lead - we made him come all the way out and he never
got a chance to actually do anything except clog up the works and make
a lot of noise.





I contemplate the situation.





Tim takes the helm as we really get into serious business.






The night finally falls to pieces as Christian tries to do a guitar track
for Savior of My Soul. He is in the tracking room in this clip.





Tom took the pics and vids. Love him, you can do no less.
Alright, thats enough for now... see you next week.