10/28/11 - MasterMix

As I type, we are working out some of Dustin's guitar overdubs. We're in MasterMix with producer Brian Jacoby. We're down to just the three of us now, since engineer John Kargol had to jet, as did label rep Paul Bolen. But we continue on into the night.

Anthony called on the way here and let us know he was pretty sick. He left it up to us whether we wanted to sit in a cramped control booth with him and eat his germs. I told him to drink some O.J. and go to bed. Hopefully he'll be able to come back this weekend for vocals, but the way he sounded on the phone, I'm not too confident.

Dustin got here, though, and knocked out his guitar parts for "Hell-Bent" woman. And like I said, as I type, we're working on "Fluffy Little Hands."

He's demonstrating to us why we call him the Sparkle Sprinkler, sprinkling sparkles where they need to be sprunk. These songs sound good as they are, but Dustin's textures and layers fill them out and give them exactly what they need. I love to see a project come together. We're in the midst of some pretty thick Beards right now, and it's going well. I can't wait until we can show this to the world. It's some pretty good stuff, if I may say.

I may.

10/16/11 - MasterMix

Today's session was another good one with Brian Jacoby.

Long story short, we decided what the definitive structure of "Modern Age" was going to be and we got drum and bass basics on it. Solid. Settled. What you hear is what we got. And what we got is good.

After that, we worked on Anthony's guitar overdubs on these songs. Again - long story short, we got a lot of what we needed. More to come next session.

Short, to the point.

10/15/11 - MasterMix

Today was our first session with producer Brian Jacoby. We tracked in MasterMix studio, located at IPR. We got there in the morning. I arrived a little bit late, but while they were waiting for me, they got the mics set up and inputs established. So that was all good. Dustin wasn't with us today. He works for a major retailer, which had a major release yesterday. It is a device whose name ends in "4S." Therefore, he had to be scheduled in order to deal with the traffic related to that. After I set up the drums and after Dillon, Paul and I got back from Foxtone, I entered the performance area to get some drum sounds.

When I entered, there was a really cool mood in the room. The lights were super dim. The performance room at MasterMix has this great blue stained glass window and there are candles on either side of it. It was really comfy and vibey. Dillon and I were both set up in the main performance room and Anthony was in one of the iso booths with his amp and vocal mic.

We had a really great session. We started with "Fluffy Little Hands." It took us a few tries, but we did finally fall into a groove. We tried a couple different tempos. We tried some stuff. And after a couple hours, we had bass and drums tracked.

Next, we worked on "Mystic Princess," which was a little more difficult than the former. Same kind of thing. We meticulously looked at tempo, mapping out different tempos for the song. We went over the ending a number of times, trying to get it right, which we eventually did. Bass and drums are tracked.

Finally, we ripped through "Hell-Bent Woman." It didn't take long. We had this one down. That is all. Bass and drums are tracked.

We called it a day and tomorrow we'll be working on "Modern Age." Will Dustin be able to be there? Will we finish all the basic tracks? Will we start overdubbing? Intriguing questions.

This entry was boring. Sorry.

9/28/11 - Tony's Home Studio

Last night, when I was tracking Dustin's guitar part for "On the Sidewalk," he mentioned perhaps adding some hand drums into the song. I thought that was a great idea.

So tonight, before my studio mixing time, I decided to track some percussion in my basement home studio. Every year at Christmas, it has become something of a tradition for my mother-in-law to give me a fair-trade ethnic percussion instrument. So, I've got these toys that I've played with, but never really used for anything.

So I set up my Bluebird mic and played away. I had fun using several different things: cabasa, beaded gourd, claves, djembe, and bean rattle. Super fun. And the percussion is exactly what this song needed. I'm glad Dustin suggested it.

I headed to IPR to mix, which I did. And I liked the way it turned out. The end.

EDIT: Here is the official release of the song:

9/27/11 - IPR C-Lab 1

Tonight was a quick session. It was a non-Beards session. I (tony) am currently in a Mixing & Mastering course at IPR and the song "On the Sidewalk" is going to be my final project and a semi-final mix is due on Thursday.

All I had left to record is Dustin's part. The previous parts were tracked awhile back, as you can read about in previous installments.

We had a pre-production session tonight at IPR, so afterward, Dustin and I took some time to get the guitar line laid down. We settled into a C-Lab and plugged directly into the DI on an Mbox 2. After a few takes, Dustin made it happen. It's all good.

I originally thought that all I had left to record was Dustin's guitar, but after we listened together to my reference song (Paul Simon's "Under African Skies"), Dustin suggested some hand drums. I thought that was a really good idea. So tomorrow I plan to make that happen.

9/20/11 - IPR Lecture Hall 1

Tonight was an overdub night. We worked exclusively on "Destiny, She Drives a Rolls" tonight. To start the evening, Dillon replayed some bass, fixing some minor flubs.

After that, Anthony tracked some acoustic guitar to add a little flavor to the song. It was really good to have the points of view of both Eddie and John Kargol, his assistant. They worked with Anthony on figuring out just the right part for the acoustic. It seemed that in general, Anthony wished to lay down an acoustic layer throughout the song. But after we tried that, the song was kind of muddy and too thick. So John, Eddie and Anthony worked out a good ornamental part. The result was good.

After spending a good chunk of time on that, we moved on to Anthony's delay-soaked guitar solo. The only problem was that his effects pedal is currently in the shop, getting serviced. Eddie Ciletti, however, did not see this as a problem. "We have tape!" he said. So we did Anthony's delay the old fashioned way, with a natural hall reverb and a tape delay. It sounds really good.

That was all we had time for tonight. Sadly, Dustin lugged his gear two blocks after finding parking and didn't even use it. We've got a few more overdubs left on this tune and then we'll move on to overdubbing the others.

Stay tuned, Junebuggers! This stuff is good!

9/13/11 - IPR Lecture Hall 1

Great session tonight.

Tonight was the first of the 'Beards' sessions since joining forces with Student Run Records. The previous sessions related to 'Beards' have been scrapped in favor of the professionals at IPR producing and tracking us. Furthermore, this is our first venture with our new bassist, Dillon Marchus.

Eddie Ciletti, IPR's resident analog wizard and mad scientist, had expressed interest in working with us. And we, who have worked with Eddie before, were interested in working with him again and tracking to tape, instead of digital as we normally have done.

Eddie was particularly interested in producing "Destiny, She Drives a Rolls," but we were told to bring two more songs in that we felt Eddie would do well with. We chose "Handlebar Mustache" and "Give Yourself."

Long story short, this session was great. We did a lot of good work. We spent most of the session on "Destiny" and moved on to "Handlebar." After those, it was late and we were tired, but we decided to run through "Give Yourself" a couple times. And awesomely, the second take nailed it. We got basic tracks for all three songs done tonight and overdubs will start next week.

The sounds Eddie got were great. It sounds really warm, rich and old school. Dillon and I discussed how we kind of wished that Eddie was doing the whole record. But don't take that too seriously. We're very excited to work with the other producers as well. It's always good to get multiple points of view.

We're off to a good start. Dillon is an amazing bassist. He's going to work out just fine. The album is going to sound gooood. You're going to like it, I know.

More to come...

[We did a fly-on-the-wall webcast of the session. You can watch it on Ustream if you feel so inclined. A few cool things happened.]