Kicking off April

Let's get quickly up to speed. Last week Oliver tracked "Tremble Bare" and I recorded "Ardor". I'm still not sure how that song will come out in the end. Scott came up with a drum sample that we looped for a reference beat for me to play along with on acoustic guitar. Then I just sang over the whole track. We'll probably pull the drums out of the mix, and Joe will either record lives drums over it, or just pieces of percussion. I don't think I'm going to redo the vocals, even though there are a couple of small areas that bother me. I just think that I want the song to stay as simple as possible. It may rest in the middle of the album, and it would be a nice change-up.

Last night Oliver tracked "Luster". As usual for the live guitars, Oliver had his rig in the bathroom while playing in the control room. The walls are paper thin, but it allows for a decent playback mix from the monitors and that loud live feel. Also, he's right there to communicate with Joe for punch-ins and such. It makes for a much faster process, since it might take an hour and a half to track a song anyway. He also tracked a lead on the loud ending of "Brasserie" which just blew me away. He was like,"Yeah, I've had this running through my head at work. I've never had the chance to try and play it, but let's see if it works." Just wait --it's incredible.

After Oliver left, I was going to track scratch piano on "Evenstar", because that song is just sitting going nowhere, and I need to have a rough mix to get to our vocalist who will duet with me on it. However, we started tracking piano on "Brasserie", which alerted us to the fact that the rhythm guitar scratch track had disappeared. So, to accommodate for that, I wanted to record my vocal part for reference. Then I decided that I was in good enough voice (I had tracked vox for "Other Door" before Oliver had arrived, which involved some harsh yelling so...) to attempt recording what I wanted to be final vox. Anywho, we never got to "Evenstar", although for the first leg of "Brasserie" we did record piano, two ambient acoustic guitar rhythm tracks, and my final vocal track. I'm still toying around with the idea of starting that song of with a mixed ensemble of vocalists that will carry the chord changes of the song over the rhythm guitars. On the other end of the spectrum, I have a trumpet player and sax player that are ready to try their hand at it. I don't want to rule any thing out. It'll all come down to the mix-down session, really.

I don't know how much tracking we'll do this week. We're all pretty busy with other things. Joe took the Akai home to go through the tracks that we have thus far and map out the songs and their virtual tracks. Even just losing some of the scratch tracks made this a very prudent idea. He's also going to make some rough mixes and piece together some of the unpaired files for reference. We need to start rehearsing for our show at the end of the month. Two or three will do, but with our tight schedules, that will effectively eliminate a lot of studio time this month. For this reason, I went ahead and pushed back the release date until early to mid June. If we get it done before that, then we'll be thrilled, but there's no use in rushing things. Oh, and btw the show that I'm talking about is Friday, April 30th at our fav place to play, John Brown's on the Square, in Marion, IL. Show starts at 8:30 with opener John Kline. I'll be posting that info to the various social networks soon.

One last note, I don't think I've posted a track list yet, or maybe I have, but I couldn't locate one after a quick search. So, here's the list so far, and the order is not set in stone.

1. Brasserie
2. Luster
3. Tremble Bare
4. Last Screams
5. Evenstar
6. Ardor
7. Years
8. Restore
9. Other Door
10. Beg the Past