LAYING TRACKS

July 29, 2013  Joel says;

This past Friday we started recording at 11 am…an unusual time for us. We do everything in house and I have been engineering all the sessions. I am constantly amazed by my bandmates endless creativity. For our new album, “international anthem” I’ve been pulling new idea’s out of the guys by setting up different guitars, amps, stringed instruments and percussion, hoping they gravitate to something different and play what they normally would not. It almost always works. Set Ben up with and crappy old semi-clean sounding amp and a hard-to-play guitar, and he’s gonna find the magic the songs needs. Here’s a guy who truly gets all of his sounds out of his fingertips.  Clyde the drummer tried laying a track playing a beer bottle with his wedding ring. I can’t even describe what that track sounds like.  Kinda like…a guy playing a beer bottle with his ring finger. Don’t think it’ll make it in the mix. Just two days before this, I was in a panic, as the AD/DA interface suddenly quit working. I have been recording everything analog to digital tape, then dumping the files into the puter doing very little modifications when I make my mix. Ultimately they are sent to Brazil to be mixed by Andre T who has done amazing work on the songs thus far.  We use no “click track” and no sampling, and everything is recorded flat with no effects, except the reverb’s of our guitar amps if we happen to want that sound. Ben has always been a master of the amp’s reverb and tremelo settings.  Lately, I’ve been doing final overdub idea’s into the puter (that’s “com”puter) because it is so much faster to grab these inspiration’s and get it tracked.  I mainly pull out all the farting and burping, and nonsense these guys do during the overdub tracks. It’s crazy, and they know I love it too, but I don’t think too many people want a good old rocking song disturbed by the antic’s we are prone to do.  So, here I am in this panic, because I’ve only got 5 songs left that need to be finished for a total of 18 songs (we’ll put the very best 13 on “anthem”)….that’s gonna be tough, because I think they are all great songs….and I can’t get these last tracks done until the interface is replaced or repaired. Not wanting to cancel this 11am session, at the last minute I  remember that earlier this year we recorded 27 classic rock songs that we never even listened to! Wow. I put them up and they are just kicking some serious ass. Really punched up arrangements. We managed to get a lot done with Elvis’ SUSPICIOUS MINDS, Spirit’s NATURE’S WAY, and Beatles COME TOGETHER. We had finished Neil Diamond’s SOLITARY MAN last year, but I think I want to remix that one.  Check back in few weeks and I’ll post these 3 or 4 cover songs. Like to know what you think. JJ      P.S. we recorded 35 songs for “international anthem”….if all goes well, we will immediately have a pretty darn good “Next” follow up album in store for you.