In the bag.

Finished.

Last night at midnight, we put down the final tracks for Tricycle. I don’t know if this will be the first one to be released, as we have a couple others that are only missing one or two elements, but tracking for Tricycle is complete. It feels good, and I know everyone has breathed a sigh of relief.

We can’t, and won’t rest too long, though there’s still a lot to be done between file-management and mixing.

It has been amazing to watch the birth and evolution of this song that started out as an ad-lib in studio 101. I put together a drum-loop and André played a random guitar riff that turned out to be an entire song. That original riff is still at the core of Tricycle.

I’ve heard capturing an ad-lib that becomes a song referred to a “lightning in a bottle”, and I think we have some. Since that day, we’ve replaced the drum loop with real drums, and Eric wrote and recorded some amazing lyrics (with a little input from the rest of us).

This song that started out just a random riff in the primordial ooze of a blank Pro Tools session, has now  sprouted limbs and crawled up onto the land as it evolves into the mixing stage.

I can already hear what this song could be, and I’m excited, as I know so are the rest of the band.

I won’t say too much, but I can tell you, this is the song you want in the background when you put the top down and let your hair blow in the wind while driving along highway 1 in the beginning of June.

Keep an eye out, Tricycle will be done soon.

(oh, yeah, don’t forget the sun-screen)

Diamond.

André’s fingers were killing him at the end of the day, but after he was done playing guitar he got behind the microphone and laid down the final tracks for Joséphine by singing harmonies on the song.

Here’s a video of André laying down tracks in Studio B:

Welcome to Room 101

When we first wrote and recorded Joséphine in 2007, the vocals seemed pretty easy. At least that was my memory of the session.  However, we wanted to re-record them because:

1. I wanted consistency to the sound (the chorus and bridge were recorded on one day, the verses were recorded 8 months later).
2. We wanted a better sound (we had originally used a Sennheiser 835 back on the original session).
3. On the first demo that we made I had a cold.

We originally recorded the demo of the song for ourselves and intended to re-record the entire song as a later point. However, there are elements of that first demo that either aren’t reproducible or more accurately: shouldn’t be messed with. Whatever we did, we had to bring over certain aspects of that original recording. That first demo captured lightning in a bottle in some respects and all of us love it because it was a watershed moment for this group.

Joséphine was the first song that we wrote as an exercise or attempt to write together.  The process was organic and effortless and everyone’s ideas were great and we were excited about what it was sounding like while we were recording it.  When we were done recording the first demo we were thrilled and that helped fuel new songs and ideas that we were able to continue to build on when writing and producing.

I had forgotten that can be a pretty difficult song to sing in that there are many different parts of the song that require different types of vocal inflection. One moment I might be singing quietly and trying to get a breathless sound and the next moment I am singing full voice. It’s not the type of song where I can just set up a mic and go for it.

For the first part of the session I was singing it correctly in that I was (mostly) hitting all of the notes correctly, but there was real emotion coming through my voice. I was singing as best I could, but it was sounding lifeless.
Two things happened that opened up the session for us that night. The first one is fairly obvious: the more I sang the warmer my voice got and the easier it was for me to transition between notes and gain greater control over my voice. The second one was a bit of brilliance on Dave’s part.

Just when things were bogging down, Dave stopped everything and asked me to: “sing the chorus like William Shatner”. I had a blast trying to emote in my best over-the-top Captain Kirk/Transformed Man delivery.
“Come…to me……….Joséphine”

That broke the ice and the next take was a keeper.

Friday nite started off with an impromptu acoustic set in the studio lounge featuring the skeleton of a new chord progression that appeared in between songs on Thursday. We were all sporting axes and the presence of special guests Saint Ethan, and CB411 set the tone for a rockin’ evening. A couple hours and a few cold ones later, we had a new song structure worked out!

Saturday Andre and I moved things into the actual studio in an attempt to bring some of the long running projects back into focus. We started out tracking drums for Joséphine, and after one or two warm up takes, Andre nailed it! I had him do a couple more takes just for fun, and it got better with each one! No editing needed! Needless to say, I’m quite happy.

Eric pumped the rough mix into the lounge for peer review.

I thought folks would like it.

I don’t think any of us expected that we would need a dustpan to pick the jaws up off the floor.

With just a few minutes left before the studio turned into a pumpkin, we decided to take a shot at bringing Clarity back from the ashes… the performances were good, but both Dre and I agreed that it was missing something, and we should try again on Sunday.

Cut to Sunday. With Dre was rested, ready and psyched we cut some excellent drum takes that again will require no editing, and it looks like we’ve got some momentum on these two tunes.

Next on the list – Drums for Never Be The Same.

This past weekend was the 3-day Independence Day holiday and Dave recorded a couple of piano and guitar parts and André strapped on a couple of guitars again to round out the song. Dave created another quickie rough mix and we were blown away.  The song that originally started out as a Pro Tools lesson has become our most and best produced song yet. We are very excited about it and once we get a chance to record the outro vocals, hand claps, & final guitars we hope that you will enjoy it as much as we have.

The song now has a title as well. André named it Tricycle.

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.

—

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.

On the 7th of February, André, Dave and I went into the studio to play freeform and jam. See what comes out. Dave played a couple of old unfinished songs of his that André and I had heard for the first time.

Normally after we practice or record, I take a copy of the work and drop it into my iTunes, slap it into my iPod and then spend the weeks listening to the work over and over to see what the hell is wrong or to write with. In the case of Dave’s two songs, I was fixated with a song called “Faded White”. I would play it over and over. Keep in mind that the recorded track that I had was only Dave’s guitar, my bass and André’s drums. There were no vocals and Dave didn’t sing any during the session.

After about 6 weeks of listening to the song, I asked Dave if it would be alright for me to try to take a stab at writing some words for his song. He graciously said that he didn’t mind and that he has some half-finished words for it already. The plan was that I would write what I was hearing in my head, play it for Dave and then he would play what he originally wrote and then let him figure out what he wants to do with all of the material.

I figured that it would be a good exercise for myself to take someone else’s song and title and with nothing else, try to paint a (hopefully) catchy melody and lyrics on top of it. I thought I could do it, but wasn’t able to commit the time needed to write until Monday night.

I spent all evening writing while André made 5 gallons of a German Alt Bier in the kitchen (along with playing drums in Socialized and the Slick Johnson Snowman Expedition, André is also a damn fine brewer). The next night (last night) I quickly double-tracked some vocals of questionable pitch on top of the original recording. At midnight last night I sent it off to Dave and let the chips fall where they may.

As of right now, I’m happy with the chorus melodies and some of the words in the choruses. However, I am disappointed in the verses and not that thrilled by either of the two vocal melodies that I wrote for the verses. I went into this experiment convinced that I was going to hit one out of the park. That I was going to write the best words that I’ve ever written. I discovered that I wrote something that’s OK and considerably short of ‘out of the park’. Disappointing, but illustrative.

On March 20th, Dave, André and I were in the studio and were doing another freeform jam. We wanted to stumble onto something that could be working into a song. We jammed for about 2.5 hours with absolutely nothing coming out of it and I for one was frustrated. I instinctively felt that there was a song dying to come out, but we were playing shit.

Suddenly, Dave started playing a riff that triggered something in us. We started shaping it and a melody started to arise. Dave quickly grabbed a mic and we all hummed the melody into the mic. That was the end of the session.

Last week, the 27th, we went back in to the studio and Dave chopped up all of the relevant parts to the song. André then worked with the different parts and arranged the song properly. After that, we all recorded new parts following André’s arrangement. Bing! We had something.

André is working on words and we plan to go back into the studio on Thursday to demo out, hopefully, a brand new song.

All of our songs get working titles until the words are written and this one is no different. We’ve dubbed the instrumental track ‘Milkshake’.

We listened to a few of the drum tracks that were recorded the previous week and realized that the demos that André was playing to were not very good. We scrapped the new drum tracks that he recorded and started again this weekend from scratch.

André took it all in stride and didn’t complain at all. In fact, he said that he was happy to get the practice in. What a pal.

Dave, & I set up outside of the drum room (Now named ‘Studio B’) with an acoustic guitar, bass and mic and we warbled out the songs while Dré crashed away.

We recut the drums on Joséphine and one other of the songs that we previously tracked, Clarity. Clarity has a number of tempo and time signature changes that makes playing along with a demo and/or a click track problematic. We scrapped the demo and the click and just played the song the way it was intended to be done. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to edit or overdub without the click. We’ll find out soon. We’re hoping to finish and release it in March but that might prove to be a bit ambitious.

While we were fixing the two songs from last week’s session, we snuck in a new song, bringing the total to 6 drum tracks for 6 songs. We have 11 songs from the set list that could be tracked and a total of 21~22 original songs to cull from. We would like to get 2 or 3 more drum tracks in the can before moving on to mixing the next song to be released: Confused.

Dmitri effortlessly tracked his guitars for Confused on Saturday the 29th. The next day was his birthday and we celebrated it by tracking drums on the same song (and with vodka, but that’s another story all together). Before the birthday festivities started, Dmitri had a chance to practice his moves.

On New Year’s Day, André tracked drums for four more songs; Tin Foil Hat, Joséphine, Clarity, and Broken Toys. Dave had him play to the old songwriting demos that we’ve been using throughout the past year. My hat is off to these guys for the hard work that they put it all day on the New Year. Now with a little luck and a bit more time, we can start getting new songs pushed out the door to you on a regular basis. We’re looking forward to days ahead and hope that you will too. -Eric