Friday, October 16, 2009

Production Log: October 15

Re-recorded acoustic guitar on Sugarbread last night. Then we had our first actual practice in several weeks.

I'm really into the new setup in the basement, where we can use multiple rooms and isolate the control room from the performance room. I wish we could get some badass wall plates so we could have the people in the performance room just plug into the wall and send that from the other wall to the computer. That would be the shit! It'd be all like white-album because you could record with people and not even see them.

I also really want some small-diaphragm condensers for mic-ing the acoustic, but they're not that high on the list right now.

It's looking like our EP will not be finished this month, but it should hit shelves in time for the holidays.

Sam

Monday, October 5, 2009

Production Log: October 1, 4

Lots of stuff got done on Thursday last week and yesterday -- mostly finishing up stuff like trumpet, rhodes, and backing vocals on Little Boy and Absence.

I thought rather than just talk about what happened I'd create a record of what guitars were used for what on the songs we've recorded -- or at least on the ones that I play guitar on.

Little Boy is pretty much all done on the silver Stratocaster I played in VHS & The Babies. The evil distorted riff is done on the Flying V (aka the Nekrolog guitar) though. That riff is distorted using a 1990s ProCo Rat (yes, for those who care, it has the lm308 op amp) on the left channel and a green late 1980s (?) Sovtek Big Muff on the right. Both those pedals were christmas presents from my brother Isaac in 2006 and 2007 respectively, so props to him. All the guitar was recorded through the Super Reverb. The tremolo on the arpeggio at the end of the song is the on-board tremolo on that amp.

Geniuses is more complicated. The main guitar part (the chords during the parts that have singing) is on the yellow Les Paul Special. That's the guitar we use live. I can't remember if it was recorded through the Super or the Dr. Z, but probably the Super. The "lead" part that basically doubles the trumpet is on the Flying V; that was definitely recorded through the Super Reverb -- no pedals on either of those, though the Flying V part was recorded with the amp turned way up to get natural distortion.

As for the double-bend riff that opens the song and divides the verses from one another, I sort of had a dilemma, as the original demo I made when I wrote the song (probably in like April of 2008) had this really great guitar sound on that part which I couldn't duplicate. It was recorded with the strat through the Stang Ray, but I was running the signal through an Analogman NKT275 Sunface with my guitar's volume dialed way down. That was one kickass fuzz pedal, but unfortunately last winter I was forced to sell it for a mess of pottage. I tried to get the same effect with another pedal (the amazing but different Fulltone '69), but I still don't think it quite captures the lo-fi nastiness of the original, which I preserve below for posterity:

Geniuses demo, Spring 2008.

Sam

Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Box (moderately murky) videos!

Finally after several days of very slow encoding (time for a new computer,) I have gotten all of the videos we took of our performance at The Box on Monday the 28th, up on YouTube. I will just post a link here to the playlist that should play in the order of the set. Check it out and enjoy.