Shiny Happy Confusion
As we roll into summer, it gets harder and harder to get four dedicated guys together two days a week for practice and recording. This past spring most of us have had personal and work commitments that have impacted the days that we practice and a couple of the recording days as well. Through it all, we are still able to get most of us together to record and work in the studio on Thursday nights.
As I might have written previously, we had no idea what kind of time-consuming suck-monster the song ‘Confused’ was going to be when we decided that it would be our first song out the door. Dave had to repair a lot problems with the recording through the previous months. A few weeks ago, Dave finished editing Dmitri’s rhythm guitar part and everyone agreed that it was a phenomenal performance and sounded fantastic.
But when Dave and I sat down and listened to the whole song with the new guitars, it was quickly evident that there was something..not..right. Turns out that the original bass line that I put down 6 months ago no longer works with the new guitars. Seeing as the new guitars sounded great and I felt that it was easier to just re-record a new bass line, I plugged in and thought to myself: “This should be recorded, edited and finished within the hour. Boy was I wrong.
Turns out that the rhythm the Dima was playing was so foreign to what I was used to, I never did get the part correct that night. We ended up having to come back the following week and lay the bass down in pieces and sections. It was quite a challenge, but I do love diving into uncharted musical territory.
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Speaking of challenges, a couple of weeks ago, we went into the studio with no ideas and challenged ourselves to write songs in different musical genres. Dave said he wanted to write an ’80′s pop song’. OK, so we started writing what we thought an 80′s pop song would sound like.
About half-way through the session, we stop and Dave gives André a Pro Tools training session. The two of them sit down together and André learns how to record a drum beat. After that, he records some guitar. Then Dave shows him how to edit the parts together to make a song. After everything was done, André came up with a pretty catchy little pop tune. We bounced it to disk and took it home with us.
The next night, I wrote some words and André liked them, so we dropped everything else we were doing in the studio and started working on André’s song.
Last night we came in with a bunch of new ideas for the song, and keeping with the spirit of the original recording André recorded every single instrument. We had the poor man on a tambourine for an hour and his arm was killing him. We are all pretty happy with the results so far. Hopefully we can get all the pieces together soon and post it on the website for you all.