Studio Blog 2 (12-3-07)

5:30pm

I woke up this morning bright and early and went and worked out with my trainer. We worked hard for our hour and then it was home to shower up quickly. As soon as I got dressed, I packed up the rest of my guitars and loaded them into my SUV, along with 3 amps and then it was off to pick up Ash at 10:30. I got him and his equipment and it was up 65N to Stephen's studio.

We got to the house a little after 11am and proceeded to unload all of my stuff. Loading and unloading is the bane of my musician's existence. One day, down the road, I will hire many men to carry my stuff in, but for now Stephen and Ash's help will have to do. Soon after we got unloaded, Steve Bishir, the main engineer for the record came by and brought an expensive mic for us to use on guitars...he also helped make sure that the "sounds" were just right. Stephen is a pro, so of course everything was great, but hoops must be jumped through for the main engineer. After he was satisfied with sounds, Steve headed off to have a day off and Stephen and I got to work, with Ash filming as we went along.

We set up and decided to work on "Pleased". We started off with me doing rhythm electric guitars. I sat down and started working with my Tradition Les Paul and Stephen decided that we needed to give it some love, so we took it down to his workshop and he worked on setting the guitar up. Once that was finished, we began working on guitars and, to be honest, for some reason I was struggling.

The thing I'm realizing quickly that a label record has to be even more perfectly precise than an indie record has to. We are taking pains to make sure everything is perfect. I would lay down a guitar part and 1 note would be off and we'd do the whole thing again....incredibly frustrating. But you know once I finally got the entire song 3 hours later, it was worth the work because it sounded awesome.

Brown showed up right before lunch, as I was finishing up the 1st part. He gave his approval on what was happening, and then, after I'd finished, we all went to lunch at a Greek restaurant not too far from Stephen's place. It was fantastic. I got a small meal, so I was able to eat great food but watched how much I ate, so I felt good about it.

After lunch, Brown headed off and left Stephen and I to our devices. I doubled my guitar part with another guitar and different tone and that went a lot quicker. 30 minutes later, we had the doubled guitar part and it was on to listening and fleshing out extra parts.

We listened through trying to figure out what was needed. We do know we need bgv's and maybe strings. Stephen will do some lead guitar work later on, but for now, we just decided we needed some synthy stuff to make it feel different than your normal pop/rock song on the radio. So we added one part to the verses and the end of the bridge, and then for the last hour or so have been working on the lead parts on the intro and turn-arounds.

Everything is sounding great.

Around 6pm, we moved on from "Pleased" feeling like we had everything we needed with the exception of some guitar parts that Stephen will do later. We moved onto "Potential". The new arrangement of this one doesn't leave a lot of space for tons of guitars, since it's a little more ethereal, so we tried to figure out what else it needed. We messed around with some synthy stuff and then decided to go ahead and record 1 guitar part. I pulled out my telecaster and ran it through Stephen's old AC30 Super Reverb, which sounds incredible. I tuned my guitar down to drop D and laid down a little distorted part that sounded kinda cool (in the mix, you'll probably barely be able to hear it, but it'll be there).

After we finished that guitar part, we worked on some keyboard stuff. I wrote a little line that I played at first in Reason and then we transferred it over to a Pro Tools program called Velvet, which is a sample-based program that sounds exactly like old electric pianos (Rhodes, Wurlies, etc.). It added a little counterpoint to the vocal, which was what the verses needed.

After we'd listened to see if anything else was needed, we closed up shop for the night and I headed home. Can't wait for you guys to hear everything.