Recording days have been very sporatic this past week, but we managed to get ALL of the guitars/ instruments done and MOST of the vocals done.

Recording vocals. I love it. I hate it. I dred it. I\’m scared of it. It\’s such a draining process, I don\’t know how I\’ve survived this far. I guess I\’m happy with everything, though. Pretty happy. As happy I as I can be I guess, you know, with being sad and all.

Anyway, as you can see I\’ve just about lost my mind and the ability to think clearly during this stage in the game. A more legable update should be coming soon. Wait… oh yeah, we begin mixing this weekend. So actually, if I update then, you should probably expect a less legable one…)

Stand by.

Well, most of the songs have been sung. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday singing and writing/ rewriting. All but 2 of the 11 songs have been completed.

You might notice that I\’ve cut writing about this part of the process short. Well, I sat down a while ago and typed out the full story, about how annoying, hard, tiring, painful, depression, fun singing is for me, but then I just didn\’t feel like hitting that \”publish\” button. Maybe I\’ll try it again sometime, but really, it\’s just not that interesting.

Deedle\’s doing his guitar tonight and will start working on his vocals shortly. We plan to mix at the end of the month, but what do plans mean anyway?

Yesterday I finished all of my guitar tracks. I even managed to work in that new classical acoustic guitar I bought the other day, and on the most unlikely song…

Deedle\’s just a couple songs away from being finished. It\’s taking him a bit longer because he\’s only been recording in short bursts after he gets off from work. But he hasn\’t run into any tuning/ guitar tone snags yet, lucky bastard, so he\’s still getting through it pretty quickly. By Thursday, vocals will be underway. I\’ll be pulling more half day/ hour here, hour there kind of days, since vocals are harder to do (impossible for me) during long stretches.

Well, I\’m heading off to work. I haven\’t been there for a full day since Wednesday. Man. Who\’s the lucky bastard again?

I\’m sitting here recouping from 2 long days of guitar recording. I know, I know, in an earlier post I said that it was expected to go quickly (\”2 takes on each song, tops\”, I believe I said), but if you recall, I also mentioned that what could possibly hinder things was finding the process of finding the right guitar sounds. Well, prediction: correct!

On Monday, I\’m hoping to finish everything up instrument-wise and start working on vocals. Then the madness will begin. Stay tuned…

Tanner finished up all of the bass guitar tracks last night. That completes all of the the \”rhythm section\” stuff. Now, if Deedle and I could just figure out how to record our parts just as quick, we\’d be on to something.

I start recording guitar first thing tomorrow morning, and I\’m actually looking forward to it. Honestly, I never really dread it that much, but I never long for it either. I\’m actually pretty indifferent on the matter. It\’s just something I know I have to \”get over with\” in order to move on. I usually don\’t do any more than 2 takes of a song on guitar. The bulk of the time is spent on finding the \”right\” sound (I put \”right\” in quotes because I have a sick obsession with quotes and because what sounds \”right\” one day sometimes sounds \”like crap\” the next day).

I did buy a new guitar today. It\’s no awesome \”ax\” or anything, just something I\’ve been wanting for a while: a nylon-string acoustic, very similar to my mom\’s, the one that I learned to play on (I tore the original up pretty good; 12 years old, Nirvana, \’nuff said…). I\’m hoping to use it somewhere on the album, though I haven\’t really thought about where yet. It\’ll \”make an appearance\”, never you worry. Or maybe I should say, \”Warning: it might \’make an appearance\’. The squeamish, look away.\”

I\’ll update again (and probably curse myself for jinxing my guitar sessions into long, hideous hours of complete pain an misery) soon.

I\’m happy to report that we arrived back from The Echo Lab on Sunday with completed drum tracks in hand. Matt M. gave it his all, recording 12 straight hours on Saturday, followed by 5 more on Sunday.

He tackled the hardest one of the bunch, a rather long one called Closer, first. He nailed it in one take, however, being the cruel cruel human being that I apparently am, I started changing little things around and before we knew it, a large portion of the song had been re-learned. It ended up taking us about 2 hours to complete the thing. Anyway, it eventually got down on tape the way we wanted, and only caused 2 nice-sized blisters to form on Matt\’s hand that he had to deal with for the rest of the session. Not bad.

The next few hours went by smoothly and easily. Matt played along to the homemade demos I did and several songs were knocked out quickly. The only drawback: having to listen to the innitially cute, but eventually annoying \”human voice\” of my metronome over and over again: \”1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-uh…\”. It sounds kind of like a strange teenage boy with a speech impediment whose voice is changing.

Then we worked on songs that we know really well, ones that have been in our set for several months now: Last Night, Stutter, Left To Prove, and Things I Didn\’t Say. The latter took the longest (finding the right tempo proved to be a real task) but since Deedle recorded his guitar live to it, we actually probably ended up saving time on that one. By the way, Things was orginally on \”Swallow the Sandwich\”. We\’ve made some slight changes to it over the last year and just wanted to re-record it. Okay? Okay.

Matt then switched to another snare drum (a 15\” something or other owned by the studio that sounded really cool) to finish the rest of the songs. When Sunday rolled around, all we had left were 3 songs. Once those were completed, we spent a lot of time going back and listening to everything (something important but hard to do when your ears are fatigued). I think we ended up re-recorded one of the songs from Saturday since we had time, but all and all we were completely happy with everything. Giddy, in fact.

Although we did spent a lot of time working on what we went there to do, we also had the chance to take breaks and enjoy all that the studio has to offer: if we weren\’t outside running from (me and Deedle) or trying to catch (Matt M) giant lizards and beast-like dogs, then we were inside gawking at/ tinkering with the huge selection of vintage instruments laying around (including the coolest/ creepiest electric organ ever made). We spent the night there on Saturday. At around 1:30am Matt literally fell asleep the second his head hit the pillow (I witnessed it). Deedle and I stayed up a bit later chatting with Echo Lab engineer Matthew Barnhart, a very, very cool/ smart/ funny guy. Even more so with a few glasses of Jameson in him. Well, maybe not the smart part.

Oh and for those who care about this sort of thing, the drum tracks were recorded on 16-track 2\” analogue tape and then transfered to DA-38\’s, so that we can finish everything else up at Deedle\’s Room.

Last night, Tanner recorded his bass tracks. Everthing\’s sounding groovy. There\’s a little bit more to do tonight, but on Thursday, guitar will be underway. We\’re getting there.

More to come as things progress. I plan to post some pictures later tonight. I may even get a chance to proof-read this and make some corrections. Check back.