Recording Diary Day 11

I almost wrote down Recording Diary, which is an entirely different thing.

I very productive session as we continue working on drums.   I badgered John until he got pissed off enough to finally nail the end of "Here Comes The Radiation."   No hard feelings and we moved on to fixing a small edit on "Diabolik" that we missed or left for later.

A little aside for those of you who are not up on current recording practices, but we, as most people do these days, do all of recording via computer.  In our case we use an application called Sonar as the heart of our studio.   There are all sorts of schools of thought on the advantages and disadvantages of recording digitally, but it’s become the standard, and for a couple of very compelling reasons.   One is cost, for a relatively small amount of money you can have a fairly decent home studio, and if you are reasonable knowledgeable about recording and mixing, it’s possible to produce something on par with stuff done in professional studios.  The second is flexibility.  In the old analog days, you would record something, mix it with people running around the studio manually moving faders and effect knobs, print it to tape and that was it.  The mixing board would be reset for the next song or client and you could never tweak it.   You would have to start a mix from scratch.  If you wanted to record more then the number of tracks that the studio tape deck could support(usually 8, 16, 32, or in real high end studios 64) you would have to bounce audio together, essentially pre-mix parts of your recording.   You were also limited to the amount of effects you could apply, based on various limitations.   Now in the digital computer age, all those limitations are gone.   You can do a mix, listen to it in your car for a few days, and decide to go back and tweak the low end, you just need to open up your project file, make your adjustments, save it as v2 and repeat until you have it perfect.   You can create as many tracks as your CPU can handle without choking, and you can use as many effects as you can afford or find for free on the Interweb.  

Enough of the aside, back to the meat of the plot.

After a little break, we got all our gear out and jammed with John on a song he hadn’t worked on yet.

This new song, called right now "On the Beach" went immediately from let’s jam it out with John, to let’s record John!   Lickety-split!

A couple of takes and another set of drum tracks ready to go.   That was wicked!  We are going to try that method out for the next few songs.  The idea being as soon as John has the arrangement worked out and knows what he wants to do on the song, we are going to record it while it’s all still fresh and warm.   The thinking is, we can always go back and redo stuff later if the urge strikes us, but hopefully we capture a lot of energy by getting the track down early.

We’re still going!  Next up is "John vs. the Machine"  The idea for this song is to try to do a song in which live drumming and programmed drumming are trading off ideas, almost jamming with each other.   First up, I created a sequence of drum loops and feed them to John who played along with them and created some variations and also some new patterns inspired by or playing off the loops he was hearing.   Next I am going to edit those down into some new parts or loops and patterns.   The end result is hopefully an interesting hybrid between real drumming and the sound of our machines.  We shall see.

A very productive session.   Tonight, now that John has pretty much caught up to the temp tracks and arrangements we have, Ed, Darren and myself will try to get the next couple of songs ready, so that Sunday we can try to get another song or two of drum tracks in the can.

We’ll have the whiteboard updated on the web soon so you can see our progress but everyone is really happy with where we are up to now.