Backing Vocals II
Last Friday 2/10 we were off the day before the Blizzard of ‘06 and decided to squeeze in some backup vocals. Rob, Jimmy and Steve all came down to yell into some mics for a while. Unfortunately Dean’s playing schedule doesn’t allow him to come down and yell with the other guys as its most convenient for everybody to do these kinds of things on an off weekend night. Dean will definitely make his statement on the album with his six-stringers though so fear not!
We had to get some backups on “Crush” for a good reason. We had an opportunity to go to a big studio to mix a couple of songs and I wanted “Crush” to be one of the ones we took down so it had to get done pronto.
A guy called Scott Spelbring dropped me an email one day via MySpace and we got to talking and he offered to help out if we needed it. Scott has worked with a number of national artists and big producers, Dave Matthews, Drew Mazurak (Linkin Park, Nothingface), SR-71, Jim Ebert (Butch Walker), Jason Mraz and Plunge just to name a few. Scott has a very impressive list of clients and an even more impressive state-of-the-art Pro Tools-based studio. And his studio is only about 25 minutes from my house, it could not have been a more ideal situation for us. After thinking about it for roughly two seconds , I took him up on his offer to mix a couple of songs for us. Check him out at Dragonfly Recording Studios. Jimmy and I went down to Dragonfly to let Scott put the magic touch on our songs this past Sunday – we were very excited with the results, more on that in the next edition . . .
I had everything setup ahead of time to maximize the time available before everybody got burned out from singing. They all three rode together and got down my way about 5:30. Steve did his usual warmups and we got down to tracking. I think we had five songs to complete, the biggest one requiring the most work was “Crush.” For those who have seen us perform this song live you’ll understand this part. We did about 10 tracks of all three guys yelling “Crush” (you know that part right? Each track with a different guy standing in the middle of the three so no one particular voice becomes dominant in the mix. I really think we nailed the arena gang vocal feel. The desired effect of course is the gigantic crowd of people yelling (or singing) “Crush.” With that many voices, it can’t possibly go wrong and it sounds nice and huge just like the idea Steve originally came up with.
A couple of times Steve had to man the cell phone as he was trying to work out with the club owner of Memories (our Saturday show venue) if we all collectively thought we should cancel the show or not due to the snow. In typical fashion here around D.C., the weathermen can never say if something is going to be real bad or just OK, so we were keeping an eye on the TV and trying to determine if we were going to get dumped on or not. Obviously we ended up playing the show on Saturday and everybody eventually made it home OK.
We burned through five songs in about four hours and at the end, there were a couple of lines for Steve to redo in some other songs that for one reason or another were not quite right. One of them was a line in “Hot On Your Heels” which is the other song I wanted to take down to Dragonfly to mix. Steve still had some juice left in the old voice box and so we went in and fixed a couple of lines here and there on a few songs.
In the previous weeks and weeks since my last installment here, we have been working on guitar and bass tracks whenever schedules and time permits. Rob has started his final phases by doing solos, Dean has a couple of his rhythm tracks to fix up, mostly because I had him play the wrong part on a couple of songs and about four more basic rhythm tracks to do. He also has to do almost all of his solos. I’ve got four more songs to lay bass tracks on and there are three more songs to do lead and backup vocals on.
Hopefully, we can proceed with mixing songs at Dragonfly with Scott Spelbring as we finish up tracking the rest of the album, so we’ll sort of have two things going at once and we won’t have to wait for all the tracks to be done before mixing starts. Damn good idea!
April 27th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Christ Almighty! Shall we expect new excerpts around the Thanksgiving time frame? Just curious…… ;o)