Our First Day of Recording (repost)

This repost is from my Tales of Dead Dog Express and first appeared on August 21, 2004.

Our First Day of Recording.
We arrived at the Goodsite Studios around 9:30 on a cold Sunday morning. Our cars were packed full with our instruments and various accessories. Our entourage consisted of a 3 car motorcade, Todd drove his van loaded with his drum equipment, I drove my car with my gear, and a third car with our "roadies" to provide moral support and provide security in the event of overzealous autograph seekers. OK, then.

We quickly set up our equipment in the cramped sound room. As I stated earlier, the studio owner left some major pieces of equipment in the room which made our set-up a little difficult. There was a full drum set enclosed by a baffle system, 2 small amplifiers, a suitcase piano, as well as a grand piano with more baffles.

Once the initial set was finished, Bob Goodsite, studio owner, began the process of microphone placement and conducting recording levels check. By noon, we were ready to start cutting tracks. Bob gave us a brief explanation of the process we would follow to record as the studio used only 4-track equipment. We reviewed the songs we intended to record with Bob and soon set about the recording process.

Our goal for today was to record all instrument tracks with overdubs for bass guitar and lead guitar parts. We had to wrap up the day's work by 4:00 pm that day so we burned through the initial recording phases. At the time, we were not really aware of how much we were conceding in terms of performance quality. There were many mistakes, some minor and some major, that we allowed to remain on tape in favor of our recording schedule.

The centerpiece of this day's session has to be while recording "Stand Up". We decided to incorporate a drum solo in the middle of the song. We added the drum solo a few days prior to this session so most the timing of this song we still "sight cues". We had a few of the guys in the sound room while cutting these tracks adding vocal encouragement for the drummer. Studio owner Bob added some special tape effects while recording the drum solo, reverb and echo effects, that really added character to the recording.

We barely completed our band tracks in time that day. Bob made a rough mix tape from our session for us to take with us. We set the next record date to be one week later and planned to finish the songs with any edits for the music and start recording of the vocals. This next session was NOT so much fun for me. More about that next time.