Studio Blog Day 1: It Begins

Originally Posted 4/17/09 on Myspace

Current mood: sneezy (awesome Myspace emoticon unavailable)

Just started off Day Two by shaving off my beard– originally I wanted a bit of beardiness in this record but this morning I had second thoughts. Let’s hope I made the right choice.

As for yesterday, it wasn’t actually a full day– we booked a half day for the sole purpose of getting sounds/tones/whatever down. See, usually what happens is you start the first day around noon by setting up the drums. This tends to take hours, and then you still have to pick out amps and set up mics and stuff, and before you know it you go “Ack! It’s 6:00 and we haven’t started recording yet!” You probably don’t actually say the word “Ack” but you know what I mean. Either way, what tends to happen (for us at least) is that you then feel like you’re behind and skimp on the getting-sounds stuff and rush right into recording. Days later when you’re mixing you realize you should have spent more time upfront but then it’s TOO LATE.

So, this time around we booked a half day devoted solely to setting up and getting things to sound good. I think this was a good call– it was way more relaxed, we spent more time on stuff then we usually do, and things are sounding really good. Of course, it was sort of tedious in parts– the vast majority of the time was spent on drums, and I know very little about drums so there were a lot of exchanges like:

“Which ride cymbal sounded better to you?”

“….is the ride cymbal the pingy thing?”

“Yeah”

“Well, I think they all sounded pretty good”

At the end of the day, though, the drums sounded pretty sweet– I think we have a better snare sound than we usually get, too.

Also, the bass is sounding awesome– I decided to use the studio Ampeg rather than my GK and we got something out of it that sounds pretty close to what my bass sounded like on the Off With Their Heads album. Kind of like….. a piano that’s come to life and is growling at you, you know?

Such technical details are probably boring to read about I suppose. What else did we do? I felt like boxed wine for some reason so I bought some boxed wine and will get cracking on that later today. I’ll report back on the flavor of it. I also bought a bag of Doritos called something like “Last Call Jalepeno Poppers”, the bag full of neon lights and stuff. There was also one called, uh, “Midnight Tacos” or something. Are the Dorito people running out of ideas? I don’t even like Doritos. It was an impulse buy as I stood in line. “You’re a sucker” Nick said as I grabbed a bag. But here’s the thing: based on the packaging they clearly want you to eat these new flavors late at night. But I’m not going to listen to their brain-washing advertising: I’m eating this today at around 3pm. Can’t get me, Doritos. I do what I want.

Ok, I gotta go meet the rest of the guys for bagels now– we’re starting at noon today. The plan is to get 7 songs done on drums today. Think we’ll do it?

Look for more interesting studio blogs than this one in the days to come, as we start actually recording music!

-Nate