Recording Blog 3 (October 25)

Over the last couple of days since the last time the band was able to record together, I had spent a little time working on stuff on my own. We're trying to make this album the best things that any of us has ever done, so we're trying to take as much time as possible on little things to make it sound just right.

It may sound like a little thing, but we're trying very hard, when we record bass parts to take the time to make it "get in the pocket and rock it!" as I heard a wise man say man a time. We're making sure the bass and kick match up and are just tight, because that is what will provide a firm foundation for the rest of everything to sound huge.

Also, we've been taking the time to experiment with interesting keyboard sounds. Instead of just taking a piano sound or a wurly sound and being happy, we're seeing how we can make it sound just strange enough to be different, but the listener still knows what it is.

For Cry Tonight, I recorded a nice little piano part for it. It sounded okay, but I knew I had to change it up just a little, so I messed around with effects and soon I had put a delay on it that made the sound almost completely effected by the delay and it gave the track an airy, shimmery quality to it.

For Gone we thought a piano part would be cool, but decided that it might be cooler (if I could pull it off) to play the entire part backwards, then reverse the track. And it turned out so freaking cool.

On Closer, we recorded a little pad sound, but as I was listening, I thought that could be cooler, so I ran the sound back out to my delay pedal and twisted some of pedals around giving it this really cool effect.

There's more cool stuff we've been doing, but I don't want to bore you.

Now, for this kind of stuff, we really are lucky to have good equipment to mess around with and experiment with, so it's not all our smarts or anything...we just have great stuff to play with and when musicians get to play, a lot of times, cool stuff happens.

Well, hopefully, by the end of the day, we will be pretty much done with the tracking of the instruments for the album. It's actually been a pretty quick process. We just have guitars to lay down.

Also, here is the final track listing of what is making it on the album:

Waiting
Know
Hero
Naive
Need
Rise
Somewhere
Tunnel Vision
Gone
Cry Tonight
Closer
Convenience
How Long

13 songs, friends, to rock your face off!