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

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

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoQnbWoXyZY&feature=PlayList&p=68B9F5A5D174E330&index=0&playnext=1

Pompadour

Weirdly enough, due to a mouth-related injury Typefighter couldn't make it to the show Monday night. This meant that for a brief time it looked like the Posters were going to be the whole bill that evening, and it's only mystery what we would have had to do to fill up the extra time allotted.

The first picture shows us before our set, pondering this question. Dave is thinking: "Is a child the answer?"

A child sort of was the answer, though. Because eventually the two lads and two lasses of Pompadour came to play, and they kicked ass! In this picture they're all like: "Dreaming is not the answer!"

A lot of their songs sort of sounded like "Godsend" by Beat Happening, except faster. Oh, and shorter. But there was lots of pretty and kind of bitter-sweet two-guitar type stuff, lots of reverb, drums, no bass, boy/girl vocals. Actually, their whole aesthetic reminded me very much of the whole You Turn Me On album, which I was totally into. I hope we can play with them again (except this time on purpose).

The Box: Monday, Sptember 28

We play at The Box tomorrow night -- our first time at this Miyagi-themed, street-level hang-out. It's on 2nd street, just south of the downtown mall.

We are playing with D.C.'s Typefighter.

The show is free.

Production Log: September 17

Thursday we did the basic tracks for Little Boy: drums, bass, and the main guitar part.

This song already exists as several demo versions I did myself, and as an ultra-rare "countrified" version recorded by Nekrolog in 2007, so we're hoping to use studio smoke and mirrors to make this new one stand out as the definitive iteration.

Even the sky mocks my pain, as our journey continues.

Sam

Recording Continues....

Here's a picture I took the Sunday before yesterday -- the 6th I guess -- of what I see when I record vocals.

I haven't been keeping up with recording notes on the blog because at this point things are moving so slowly and the tweaking is so subtle that it would just be the same thing every time I posted. It'd be all like: "Turned down the reverb today. Here's a picture of what I looked like doing it. LOL! WTF! Natch!"

Though if the point of this blog is in part so that we can all look back when we're old at the day-to-day activities of a band we were once in then I probably shouldn't be overly concerned with entertainment value, ね?　それは日本語でですから。

Absence, Geniuses, and Sugarbread Falls continue to hover in that weird gray area somewhere between "perfect" and "tolerable." They all sound good, but not so good that I feel ready to stop screwing around with them.

On the 6th ultimo Dave and I recorded lead vocals and lead guitar on Geniuses, and re-did the electric guitar on Absence. Also on Absence I added some bad-ass electric piano which you will probably just barely hear in the final mix.

Yesterday we made subtle mixing changes to everything.

Still left to do are some trumpet fixes, made necessary by some poorly thought out mic placement the first time around, then two more songs from the ground up. And possibly some backing vocals on Absence?

It's still rock n roll to me,
Sam