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2004-06-30 - 10:56 p.m.
this is the sound of someone losing the plot
This past Saturday, I went down to Takoma Park to do some more recording with Mat. Since he's going to be shutting down the studio for a couple months while he moves into a new house soon, it was my goal to get as much recorded as possible before the shutdown, and get some rough mixes on CD to take home and listen to and get a sense of where we're at in the progress of my record. So we're going to do those rough mixes in mid-July, and I wanted to have one more recording session before then. But unfortunately I was underprepared for the session and we didn't get a whole lot accomplished, at least compared to the last few sessions. It's frustrating, because after the last session, I knew there was some writing and demoing I could do to prepare for the next one. But for the past few weeks, I've been working a ton, Saturday was actually the first day off I'd had in almost 2 weeks, so I really hadn't had a lot of free time or energy to do that stuff. Still, not having a very clear agenda of what I was going in to do like I usually do kind of freed us up to improvise a little, and I got to work on some drum machine-driven tracks, which we haven't really done much of so far. In the beginning, what I had in mind for this record was to have a mix of songs with live drums and songs with drum machines, roughly half and half. But of the 11 or 12 songs we've tracked so far, only 3 have drum machines on them. Which is fine, I don't mind showcasing my live drumming more, but I want to keep that variety there. I should probably invest in some more drum machines to get better sounds and more kits, anyway. Right now I use it more as a writing tool than anything else. After screwing around a bit with my drum machine and pushing it so far into the red on my 8-track that it created some cool distortion, we started a new song pretty much from scratch. I brought my own kit, but the only live drums we recorded that day we did for that song on Mat's kit, since his higher snare sound would probably compliment it better, and we're probably going to end up distorting the hell out of it anyway. I tried coming up with some keyboard parts for a couple songs on the fly, but nothing really clicked. I'm not very good at writing in that position, with the clock ticking, which is why I usually try to be more prepared when I come to the studio. Plus melody isn't really my strong suit to begin with. Rhythm's my natural element, I can sit down at a drumset or drum machine and within a couple minutes come up with something I'm happy with, but the handful of melodies I've come up with that I really like have all been honed down from many many aborted attempts. And most of the good ones that I've already narrowed down have already been tracked for songs, so I'm starting to run out of stuff in my backlog to mess around with. So after about 5 hours, the session was really running out of steam, so we decided to call it a day early, since Mat had a garage sale to prepare for anyway, and we went and grubbed at Subway before I got on the road. I wish I'd been able to make more of the opportunity to record, but oh well. At least it ended up being shorter and therefore less expensive than my sessions usually are, which is fine by me financially. And in a couple weeks when I go back for the rough mixes, I'll finally be able to take home a hard copy of what we have so far, and I can study that and take a couple months to get my shit together and figure out what I need to do to turn it all into a record by the end of the year. -al
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