www.organical.net

We actually started recording on Sunday!  Yes 5 sessions in and we have some tracks down.  John made the good point that we are actually doing fine time-wise as when you actually are in a studio and getting your drum sound, you may spend a day or two just getting to this point.   We’ve probably spent about 15-20 hours of real time to get here.

The day started with finalizing our sound, and I must say I think we’ve got a pretty killer sound, and more or less the way we planned using just the overheads, a kick, and a snare mic.  We’re also tracking individual mics on the hihat and toms but I doubt very much we’ll use them.  Oh, and we are also tracking a sub-kick and that we are TOTALLY using.  It sounds great.

Once we were happy with the sound, we tried tracking "black hole quietly" which is alternate version of "black hole."    We tried this a few different ways and got some pretty good results.  We then tried a few takes of "black hole" but we had a glitch in the best take, and were pretty much out of time so we’ll come back to this one next session.

BTW, the song titles I reference here are working titles and may or may not represent the final song title.  That would entail me actually writing lyrics.   When the final title are arrived at I will note it here.

I was actually thinking while we were doing this that I should make sure I bring my lyric notes with me.  I thought of a few ideas while we were working and I should really capture them and not trust my faulty memory.  Lyricists probably do this kind of thing all the time, but I tend to let stuff knock around in my head and then sit down and write them all a panicky white heat minutes before we record vocals, but in the immortal words of William Murderface, "It’s all about organization."

Here’s John kicking it (and hitting it, and keeping time with it.)

Back on schedule so to speak, and the drum work continued with some progress made.  The kick has been tamed.  It’s still not quite there but I think we are in the ballpark.

We also did a bunch of tests with John’s bundle of snares to see what’s what and sampled a variety of his drums included the sonic boom inducer which is his closed Gretsch bass drum.

I wicked discovery was that Ed’s little Zoom H4 portable recorder worked AMAZING as a stereo room mic, like literally it blew me away.  Love the Zoom.

I’m off on some travel this week so next week we’ll start laying down some drum tracks, it might be a little start and go and stop and do over but I think enough tooling around for now, it’s time to dive in.

Cutting up samples is also on the agenda this week, fun me.

I can’t stop listening to Red Sparrowes right now.  I really can’t.

Is now available online through iTunes.   I don’t know how stuff gets done in that world, but I gather if you go to the iTunes thingy and search for Organical you will find it.

You can buy from iTunes the whole shee-bang which includes all the songs from the "comfortchurch" ep as well as our Corpses of the Dead/Sympathetic single, or if I ever get off my ass, you will be able to buy through this very website a physical copy of the CD, which is a very limited edition of 44 copies…and my Mom and Darren’s cousin each want a copy so they are going fast.  The physical CD has 2 extra tracks not available from anywhere else, and that I’m not allowed to even talk about.

Darren has posted the song Corpses of the Dead up on our myspace/organical page, if you actually need to hear it before spending the money.

Boy oh Boy are we having some struggles getting going here.   Some roadblocks include(but not limited to) The Lab(our recording home, and Ed’s basement) getting flooded and having a tree fall on it.  Seriously.   It’s also been a bit of a scheduling conundrum with the boys in the band busy on summer wanderings and the like.

Day 2 was really just getting back together, eating some hamburgers and running through some of the material to see if we remembered how to play it.  John, our resident Drummer Laureate was not available so we jammed on some Magma songs instead.   Don’t be surprised if we don’t start playing Zombie Ghost Dance at some point in the near future.

Day 3 was studio update time.   John was again unavailable, so we planned to update our software(SONAR 7 is our main weapon of choice) and setup my portable Instant-Organical station, which included my laptop freshly loaded with all the rough tracks, sequences and samples that we are using.  The slow part is making sure all the plugins we use and all the sound libraries are loaded and in the right directories so they match up with my home setup.   Ever complicated, it means we are now keeping, or trying to keep 3 computers in sync.   Which file version of the song is the right one?  It’s almost a metaphysical question.

John did chime in with news that he’s bringing a new bass drum head so we can hopefully resolve our kick sound woes from day 1.  

Next up is hopefully getting our drum sound super, and maybe, just maybe we can actually start laying down some tracks.  I live in eternal optimism.

Yo all, Organical has headed back into the recording studio.  Actually we just went over to Ed’s and put on our labcoats.  It’s full on at "The Lab" a.ka. Bad Vision a.k.a. Ed’s basement.

I’m going to keep a accurate and detailed account of our time in The Lab.  This will give anyone who cares a look behind the scenes about what a bunch of part-time serious musicians(I mean we are serious musician’s all the time, but only get to do it on a part-time basis.) do to satisfy the urge to create music.  Ultimately, when all is said and done the only consumer that we expect is ourselves, but we are not adverse to anyone else listening in.

So we arrived at The Lab in the evening full of hope and anticipation, optimistic and head’s held high.  John brought in his fantastic set of vintage Gretsch drums and an assortment of fine snares and so it begins.

After the drums were setup, we began the process of getting everything positioned, miked up and started to get a drum sound.  John’s Gretsch kit sounds fantastic but we struggled to get a kick sound that accurately represented what we were hearing.   We are attempting on this record to really capture a live drum sound, with as few mikes as we think we can get away with.   We really want to capture the sound of drums in a room and as such want to avoid close-miking and that direct dry sound.

We are also experimenting on this recording with running sound through Ed’s 8-track.  We’ve gone this route before when we recording the drums for "The Elementals", but different room, different deck.  We tried it out a few weeks ago and it sounded great.

After a few hours of trying different combinations, we got closer but the drum sound is still not there.   Being the part-timer’s we are, we won’t get back at it until next Sunday so hopefully we can start tracking then.

This is the first full Organical CD in a few years, so it’s expected to take us a few months.  It would be nice to have the luxury of dedicated, consecutive days but alas, we need to pay for our guitars.

More next time.