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Almost done with vocals! Then mixing and mastering next week. We're going to Dan at Colossal again. What a relief.

Why next time will be way easier:
• We will (if all goes well with Mickey) have a really good drummer. No more staying up all night writing Drums From Hell tracks. Just say, "hey Mickey, play your drums!" and hit record.
• We should have some money saved up from selling this CD and hopefully touring to actually go to a studio. That will save tons of time and headaches on my end. I don't mind recording at all, but of course it's nicer to have someone else to do it for you. Plus, it's nice to not have to be the one panicking when things don't work. Even if we just go to a studio for the tracking and I take it home to mix and edit, I'll be in a lot better shape.
• If we do get some sales on this CD, we'll most likely get some offers from a mid-size US label that will pay a decent amount for a recording. That would be an even bigger load off of our shoulders.

Lessons learned on this recording:
• We should take care of more stuff in pre-production. The more we have done to begin with, the less time it takes stressing out about the equipment and deadlines. We didn't have much of a choice this time, so it's not like I regret the way we did things, but hopefully we'll be able to do things more traditionally next time. By "traditionally" I mean, take a couple of solid months of practicing and demoing to get the songs really nailed-down perfect in our heads, and spend less time going through ideas during the tracking phase.
• It's funny, I look back at this post and the one thing I was happy with was guitars. Well, we did guitars TOTALLY different this time, and I could not be more pleased. Since my monitoring is so much more accurate, we were able to concentrate more on getting really great sounds at the source. Not that we didn't before, but we just did it better this time.
• A little pressure can be a good thing. We are being pushed by the label to get things done in a certain time frame, and it's great because I think I spend less time worrying about things that really aren't that important.
• Presets are a good thing. I used more of them this time and it made life a bit easier.
• Good equipment is fricken' WORTH IT. So worth it. Sometimes I can't believe I even tried to make records on the crap that I had before... sheesh....

  Posted by dre at 10:56 AM | Permalink

In April I had Superfri in to record a one-day preproduction demo. They were a lot of fun to record, and I think things turned out pretty decent for the time we spent. I still need to go through their demo and point out some suggestions for where they can improve when they to their final recording. Anyway, it was the first project I did with my new mixer, which I'll post a review of shortly.

This past Saturday I also had Chris from Much The Same in to do some quick overdubs for their record. We did some gang vocals and I also generated an effect for a part that Chris wanted. For the gangs we had Eric, Chris, Gordon from Q-101 and A Revolution Is Here, Jeff and me. It was definitely a quick session, but I think the results are pretty good. I sent the tracks to Cameron on Monday night, so we'll see if they actually make it on to the record!

Chris pointed out that I'm doing an awful lot on their record... I took the live photographs that they're going to put in the liner notes, I sang backups with Jared on a couple of songs, I did gang vocals both in California and then again here, I engineered the session here and I also did a guitar solo in one of their songs. I only really asked to get to go out and help with backup vocals, since I wanted to see them work with Cameron. Everything else pretty much fell into my lap, either they asked me to do something or I offered to as a spur of the moment thing. It actually feels pretty good that they wanted my help with all that stuff too -- I mean I don't consider myself a pro really so it's cool that they (I hope) feel that everything's up to par.

Hm... other Punch It news.. Still working on a Counterpunch demo. That's kind of on the back burner for now since our first CD isn't even out yet... But it's nice to work on new stuff when I have a chance.

Technical To-Do:
• Calibrate both dbx 160xs' so that 0db is actually 0db. I hate meters that lie. To do this I'll need to hook up an analog output on the 3200 to a patch point. To do THAT I'll need to build another few TRS cables. bleh.
• Build more mic cables.

Posted by dre at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)