We recorded everyting at my studio using mostly my amps and a few of Dean’s. We recorded V-drums here with Alex Hicks using my Roland kit with live hi-hats. The best thing about the V-Drum kit is the realism, it required very little MIDI editing and even then it was mostly velocity or double triggering issues. I used a variety of kits pieces, from BFD 1.5, 2.0, Steven Slate Platinum and even some choice drum samples thrown in here and there meticulously crafted by Scott Spelbring and Beau Hill.

From a bass player perspective, I’m quite pleased with all the bass tones. There are some really great bass sounds on this record and I had a lot of fun experimenting with different bass signal chains. You won’t hear the dismal results of the hairbrained experiments which were at times quite comedic, you get only the good stuff!

There is almost no editing on this entire CD. I hate using the cliche “old school” but that’s how we did everything, take after take until it was right. I did the bass tracks on my own (without Dean around to tell me to play more like Geddy Lee and less like John Entwistle lol) and there are a few speedy bass parts I must have done 20 or 30 takes to get it right rather than fall back on sliding things around in Pro Tools to make timing better. We did the same with the guitar solos, some nights spending four hours on one solo instead of comping parts together later.  There is not a single tuned vocal note either which is a strong testament to Dean’s ability to sing in key, even if we redid some phrases here and there at different times.

Let me also add that I’m working hard on mixes for the new Funny Money CD. We are getting closer and closer and things are sounding pretty good!

So listen to a few of my favorite cuts and buy it! Dean will be happy you did and so will you.

Dean Cramer’s So Low - Put It On Your Lips - BUY IT NOW!

The problem with this bass is, I totally hate the color. It’s Miami Vice teal. I love Miami Vice, but this color makes me want to go push over old ladies at the mall. I almost didn’t buy it just because of the color, but like I said, I had never seen one for sale and I might not ever see one in a color I was crazy about. It was cheap enough so I figured what the hell.
This ugly little girl with the silky rosewood neck has been sitting around here in my house for about three years, once in a while getting my attention enough to pick it up and play it. It’s kind of like that one girl who like maybe has a really nice physical attribute, but you look further along and she’s got other problems that are not so evident. Or like she’s rather bland in every other way other than she’s really super smart and you have a cool conversation with her once in a while. Like she has one memorable thing that makes you say, “yeah I know you got a little something going on there…” but there are other aspects that kind of cancel the one thing out that you can’t forget about or rationalize away. I’ve used it on a couple of my own demos and on one track I recorded for my bud Scott, and no matter what I’ve tried while tracking, it’s always sounded rather poor – on a good day – but it plays freakin’ great!  The neck is very much like the Warwick LX I use all the time so I have consistently felt right at home whenever I pick her up and play. But man – it sounded just awful! How can that be? I could be sitting there tracking, fiddling with eq and compression to try to bring this thing out of the gutter, get frustrated, unplug this bass, plug in a Warwick with the exact same signal chain setup and it would sound stellar. It had to be the bass. Pickups? Strings? Bridge? I dunno. All of the above? One odd thing about this bass, it sounds so good just “in the room” – like it has a great ring to it when I just sit there and wank around on it without plugging it in. I generally won’t buy a guitar or bass if it doesn’t have that “ring” to it when I pick it up and play it without plugging it in. Of course, buying shit on eBay, I’m rolling the dice a little but if it’s something I want, who cares right? Ebay has a good “return” policy that I use in my own mind to justify a purchase like this, if you buy something you hate you can turn around and sell it to some other mook the next week. You may lose a few bucks but I consider any losses incurred a rental fee to try something out that I couldn’t otherwise find at the local Overpriced Musical Instruments and Accessories Conglomerate store.

I tried putting passive Duncan pickups in it one time and it still sounded pretty lame, I reverted back to the original pickups just to keep it stock for the time being. Finally, since I desperately wanted to give this girl a chance I decided to go all in and change everything I knew sucked about her to fix her, or just put it away in the case so she will stop tempting me. I bought a Bartolini 4.7 AP kit and paired that up with the passive Duncan Basslines SJB-2 Hot Jazz and SPB-3 Quarter Pounder I had bought a while back. I figured a Leo Quan black (if it ain’t black, send it back)  Badass Bridge couldn’t hurt. The bridge that was on her was definitely a problem, it was made out of some cheap non-sustaining pot metal, the same thing the Toyota Celica logo on your high school girlfriend’s car was made of. I wouldn’t even use it for a fishing weight. Garbage as far as creating good tone goes.

The installation was fairly easy, I’ve always repaired and modified my own instruments, drawing the line at refretting, but the bridge install ended up being a bases loaded with a tired pitcher situation. The screw holes from the old bridge were not even close to the holes on the Badass bridge. So with a straightedge, some serious eyeballing and highly questionable deductive measurement procedures, I nailed the bridge in a spot where I figured I could intonate it even if it was at the limits of sharp or flat and faithfully sank the slick black screws into their new home. Side to side was another story, all I can say is that it looks symmetrical so it must be OK!  

I put a new set of DR High-beams on her and messed around with the EQ switch and boost/cut knobs for a while until I understood what each one did tonally and how the interaction made the bass respond differently to my touch.
Here is a song I wrote to try out the new tone and see how it sits in a mix. The bass is the resurrected ugly Fender, DI’d through a Radial JDV Mk3, then through an SSL E Signature Channel and then through an 1176LN compressor. I then made a copy of the track in Pro Tools, shelved off the low end at about 200hz, put a Massey Tape Head plugin on it with the bright switch on, then brought this track up underneath the DI track in the mix to give it some bark. Check it out…

Forgive Me

Scott, Jimmy and I got to Oklahoma City at about 3:00 am or so. Of course the hotel where all the bands were staying had no rooms available but we figured it was worth a shot, our rooms wouldn’t be ready until noon. No biggie, we went down the street and plopped into the Ramada for some well earned sleep. When we got back to the hotel around 1:00 the next afternoon, I saw Nuno Bettancourt from Extreme hanging around the lobby. They were playing Friday night and I was looking forward to seeing them. We decided to check in and head on over to the festival grounds to see what we were in for. Night Ranger was on the bill that day too, Scott especially was ready for that.

We caught the shuttle from the hotel over to the grounds, about a 45 minute drive to Pryor, and I was immediately impressed with the SIZE of the place. Campers, RV’s and crap just as far as the eye could see. The stage building was enormous and you could see the Jumbotrons from far far away. As clear as if you were holding one in your hand, even in the blazing bright southern sunlight. As we came through the gates, our driver commented on a crowd of big burly guys hanging around, apparently helping festival staff doing whatever was needed, saying, “there’s THC…” The were dressed in all black, wearing leather jackets (in 100 degree Oklahoma heat) with Texas Hippie Coalition logos on the back and the occasional cowboy hat. I’d kill for one of those jackets they were so cool! These were some downright serious looking dudes. Much later, like three weeks ago, Scott figured out that when he lived in Texas way back when, he used to play in a band with the guitar player. Small world indeed. At the time I didn’t know if they were a band or a motorcycle club or a pot smoking club (THC and all) or what, but I knew they had a cool name and I wanted one of their leather jackets!! Check out their MySpace, they are a killer southern rock/metal band, sort of like Pantera meets Lynyrd Skynyrd – and I dearly love me some Skynyrd! THC has some good songs and cleary they are good players in classic southern tradition. Buy their CD, you’ll be glad you did.

Jimmy used Scott’s kit and brought his snare and cymbals. Scott got everything mic’d up with some nice super-high room mics to get all those pretty reflections of those drums bouncing off the wooden walls. We did some test drum tracks with Jimmy using his Zildjian snare, the one made from cymbal brass that he got from them back when he had an endorsement. It’s possibly THE loudest snare ever made. It sounded really good with some ringy overtones, and we weren’t sure if that whas what we were looking for. Scott suggested we try his Ludwig Black Beauty just for fun. Jimmy played for a few minutes and we recorded it and took a break to listen back. Jimmy decided he liked his Zildjian better. It did sound great, so did the Black Beauty but they were too different to compare really.

With the drum sound set, Scott took off for a few to get his dogs from his house and bring them over for company. Jimmy Rob and I decided to run through the arrangements of the three songs and we did quite well! Originally Rob and I had the idea of recording my bass and his guitar at the same time to capture the live vibe as best we could but we spent alot of time working on drums and we figured we’d probably want to redo some parts later anyhow. We decided we’d just sit in the room and Jam with Jimmy as he tracked his drums.

There is a famous story about Keith Moon’s antics in the studio during the recording of Who’s Next. He and producer Glyn Johns along with the first engineer had spent about three hours working on drum sounds, moving mics, changing drums, tuning drums, etc. When they finally “got it” Moonie asked the guys in the control room if everything was just how they wanted. They answered “yeah man we really got it” and Moonie asked “are you sure” they replied, ”oh yeah perfect Kieth, just perfect.” Then Moonie promptly stood up, and walked right through the front of the kit, brandishing that wide evil grin of his. Great story.

The point of that story as it applies here is this. The room we recorded drums in was very live and hyperactive. I was sitting about three feet from Jimmy and his pounding the kit was so boneshakingly loud that I had to look up from what I was doing because it sounded like he was walking through the kit continuously! At which point I would be in rather serious danger of big heavy things falling on me. I play with Jimmy alot and I’m pretty used to being in close proximity of his powerful drumming, but when he has something he does not normally have – a gargantuan reflective room as an amplifier – it’s downright scary shit!

Here’s a video of some of what we did. It’s long and mostly pretty boring, it’s kind of like watching a video of somebody at work, nothing exciting about a bunch of people taking their job seriously. Even in a cool studio making music. But that is how it is in the studio and so here you go!

Jimmy at Dragonfly Studios 8/15

I’ll give y’all a demo version of one of the songs we are tracking for you to hear how a track evolves from the demo stage to the version we feel is good enough to release. This is an older song that was written by Rob and Craig Stegall ages ago, one that Rob and I felt strongly enough about the music and feel to try and pull it from the vault to revive it as a Funny Money song.

This song was in dire need of new lyrics so I went about re-writing the lyrics using some ideas Rob and I wanted to explore using only the original title. I think Craig came up with the original title, which was “When Love Seems Dead.” For the rewrite of this song, Rob had the idea of using the simile of how at any given point in a relationship, ”love” with someone can be like a dog playing dead. So we expanded on the idea walking ourselves through similar scenarios we’ve both been in. How sometimes when you reach a point in a tulmultuous relationship when you are not sure if the love is actually gone or if the love is just playing dead. Like when you have problems with someone you are supposedly in a serious relationship with, you talk about things, try to resolve them and nothing happens, there is no forward motion. Sometimes you just get sick of it and it seems like they do nothing to help the situation and it’s all one-way. Where the rubber meets the road, it’s all you and no them. You’re just like “yeah this thing is almost over now” and you feel that emotional door closing a little, that slightly uneasy sinking feeling of going down the far side of a long swale in a speeding car. Then suddenly the other person does something cool or unexpected, maybe start acting like they are more into the little thing you have built together than last week, or do something huge they said they would do for you on an emotional level. Something out of the ordinary arc of the relationship that gets your attention in a positive way. And you think, “Hey this might be alright! Maybe things will work out…” and you get all excited again about this person and your relationship, so you “throw it a bone again” and keep trying until the next time love plays dead. But once you start feeling that way, how do you really know which it is? Is love dead or is it just playing dead like a little dog trick?

I tried to put that whole space that we are all familiar with, that ebb and flow of the shaky love-not-love thing into these lyrics and I hope it makes a connection with listeners. It’s definitely something we can all relate to. So this song is about those feelings and the uncertainty of what it feels like “When Love Plays Dead.”

Remember this is NOT what we recorded, this is a demo, with crappy plug-in guitars and a Jimmy-approved BFD drum track. Oh and Steve didn’t get around to singing on the demo, so this is Rob belting it out. Enjoy!

One of the biggest problems we had with doing these multi-band festival shows, is that we are very used to our stereo in-ear monitor system we built for ourselves to use with Funny Money and we didn’t want to go back to the old “way of the wedge” for any reason. Not to mention the fact that any large venue multi-band show anywhere is usually a cluster fuck during changeovers. Steve, Jimmy and I all have Ultimate Ears in-ear speakers. Steve and I have the Shure PSM-400, Jimmy plugs straight into the mixing board back by his drums with a stereo cable. Rob plays commando with no ear plugs or in-ears, he tried them but didn’t like them. He’s a brave man. We have fine tuned our mixes over the last few years and it works great for all of us. (Ronnie has Ultimate Ears and a Shure unit but he doesn’t use in-ears with KIX)

So when this came up, and Funny Money was off that weekend anyhow, we decided to do it if Jimmy and I could figure out a way to get our in-ear rig down to Oklahoma without spending a thousand or more dollars on air cargo. We decided to drive. We figured eighteen hours, good company, a couple of iPods and Jimmy’s van, we’d have a great time. We’ve all made the drive to Florida numerous times and this was just a little farther so what’s the big deal? When we did get to the venue, we saw a bunch of Rockit Cargo pallets backstage that were from Queensryche. That must have cost them an arm and a leg and we were glad we didn’t further line the pockets of Rockit Cargo with our hard earned cash…

I had asked Scott Spelbring to go with us to run FOH since our regular sound man Joe Corcoran couldn’t make it that weekend. Scott offered to ride with Jimmy and I and we’re glad he did, we had a blast on the drive and Scott just added to the fun. With my new hard disk video camera in tow, off we went. I had an old digital tape camera and decided to update my gear for the trip. This one even has the Super NightShot Infrared system for that fuzzy green-and-white-tinged-hotel-heiress-sex-tape effect.

Here’s some video I took on the way down edited down for, um, you know . . . dramatic effect.

One time in particular I recall having saved up $10 from allowance and since the bus was free, I had enough to buy one record and a soda. My friend and I decided to make a special trip to The Top Pop Shop one Saturday to buy a record, which is something we often did only when we had more money so we could buy more than one record. Trips out there off base were slightly frowned upon by our parents, but they always let us go anyhow.

I knew what I wanted, it was the latest Rush album called Hemispheres – one record, a 45 min bus trip and a two mile walk - $5.99. I remember walking back to the shuttle bus stop with this weird blue and pink album with a naked man on the cover in the magenta plastic bag with The Top Pop Shop logo on one side. I remember thinking about how great it was going to be when I got home and my friend and I could spend the rest of the day filling our young minds with brand new music buy guys who were so cool they had white shag carpet on their stage! We knew that because we had studied and dissected every picture in the folds of ‘All The Worlds A Stage’ and their rare appearances in Creem Magazine. Sure we liked Zeppelin, Boston and AC/DC like all the other kids over there, but if you knew about Rush, oh man you were SO in on the real deal! Rush was our band!

I been looking forward to this show for quite sometime since I missed Snakes and Arrows the first time around. Rush always seems to play in our area on a Saturday and we play every Saturday so I had been SOL on the R30 tour and the first round of S&A. This was my first experience using StubHub and it was a positive one. I used to use a ticket broker to get something in first couple of rows, but my former contact is shall we say, involuntarily “out of the business” at the moment. I bought sixth row on Geddy’s side and received my tickets promptly about three weeks before the show. Nice. I’ll be using StubHub again just for the low hassle factor alone. I had two tix, Lisa couldn’t go and isn’t a fan, Rob couldn’t go, Jimmy couldn’t go (he has yet to see Neil play live), Dean already had tickets. I decided to invite my good friend Kelly. She was a casual Rush fan who had never seen them before. She was about to be welcomed into a really special and exclusive club like no other.

We hooked up with Dean before the show, and we talked Rush talk for a while. It’s funny how real Rush fans always refer to the band members by their first names, as if we know them – nothing could be further from the truth but it’s always first names only during Rush discussions with other known Rush fans – as Kelly noted for future reference! Dean checked out all the merch I bought giving it the stamp of approval. I think he went and got a shirt later. They had some really cool stuff, dog tags, temporary tattoos, tie dye shirts, USB drives with the Rush logo, and everything was priced very reasonable. $30 for a shirt – a cool shirt with cool artwork on both sides – $5 for temp tattoos, $10 for dog tags or a baseball hat. You got a sense that the band was really trying to make the merch affordable for all the fans. Everything seemed well worth the price, not the normal rape and pillage pricing at most concerts. And there was cool stuff for women. Even though Rush concerts are mostly a sausage fest, at least the women who do show up get nice choices for merch!

I’ve seen Rush about seventeen times, sometimes twice on the same tour. I try to never miss a tour. My first Rush concert was the Moving Pictures tour in 1981-82. I still have my concert shirt! This latest album Snakes and Arrows is the best Rush album in forever. It hearkens back to the classic Rush era, the era that made me LOVE this band. For the first time since probably the Counterparts tour, I was looking forward to hearing the new material live, there are so many good songs on the S&A. Not to say that all the in between albums weren’t good, for example, I didn’t even buy Test for Echo, which I love, until after I saw the show on the ’97 tour, but this new album is OLD good. One song in particular really had my head moving sideways. A song called ‘Workin’ Them Angels’ is a good song already, but whoever is the creative mind behind the Rush visuals hit one out of the park with the imagery on the big screen for that song.

[Show as slideshow]

At Rush concerts, everybody cheers when certain things are shown on the big screen, it’s a given. Everybody always goes nuts over the same images for the same songs, for the love of the familiar and the nostalgic. The Starman is always a guaranteed roar, and we as fans just can’t get enough of that one. But there might be a new classic in the works here. ‘Workin’ Them Angels’ seems to be about how people can do things on the edge over and over without killing themselves and how those people tend to work their ‘guardian angels’ overtime. Like guardian angels have to work harder for some people than they do for others who don’t take as many risks in life. During the song, the big screen cycled through false color images of people doing dangerous jobs with long flowing sepia-toned angel wings on their backs. Then an image of two soldiers in full desert battle gear popped up, one crouching with an M-16 and the other standing beside him – both had angel wings. The crowd roared so loud it drowned out the band. It sent chills up and down my spine – the emotion was just overwhelming. THIS is why we go see Rush!! THIS is why our religion is better than yours! Most times you just expect to go to any concert and hear the songs you know and love so well, but the imagery for this song was so powerful and so moving, it far eclipsed any of my old favorites (Well, maybe not ‘The Trees’) and made me love that song so much more.  Talk about going the extra mile, this was absolutely out of this world for me. It was that moment when your brain is so overloaded with positive aural and visual stimulation that your cortex just gives up and collapses in a gelatinous mass of euphoria. I love being caught off guard like that. It does not get any better than that for me.

Since Vapor Trails tour, Rush has done a three hour show with a half hour intermission. Dean and I called each other during intermission to share our thoughts and impressions at the midway point. We agreed we were both right in the middle of being blown away! We spotted each others seats and waved like a couple of 12 year olds! Kelly was impressed at her first Rush concert and eager to be in the club from now on. A week later she had learned for herself all the band member’s real names and some of the story behind 2112 – off to a good start!

The seating up front was pretty informal, the security would let people walk up into the middle to take pics – nice touch. I got some pretty good pics of Geddy. One time he came right up to the edge where I was standing and I hurriedly got off a few shots. I had to admit to Kelly after I took a couple of strides back to my seat that my heart was beating like a little fanboy standing five feet from one of my heroes. One drawback to our seats, the keyboard rig blocked Neil. I could see his feet pretty good, but was resigned to seeing him up on the big screen when his turn came. The sound was fantastic as usual. Clear as a bell top to bottom.

Kelly made a few more observations on the religious aspect of being a Rush fan at a Rush concert. Things that we have taken for granted for a very long time. One thing that struck her the most I think, Rush has THE most air drummers per capita than any other band. When you turn around and look at the crowd, it’s quite a sight to see, everybody nailing every crash and every fill in almost perfect unison. Another, everybody sings the wailing part in 2112: Overture. Together. Loud. It’s just what you do! No need to be embarrassed to do it because everybody else is doing it too! It’s like there is a script for fan participation that we all just know, it ain’t written down anywhere, you just have to go to enough shows to know what to do. It’s kind of like going to church, where you know the Order of Mass, when to say ‘amen’ and ‘also with you’ – you learn by going and participating repeatedly!

I cannot wait for the next tour. I cannot wait for the DVD from this tour, and I can’t wait to ‘see’ those songs again. Maybe next year they will do ‘The Camera Eye’.

Going back a few months for a little background, I had recorded most of the tracks on a Roland VS-2480, with the exception of a few backup vocals, all the sample loops, orchestra and some sound effects, which I recorded in Sonar. I had planned to mix using Sonar on my computer after transferring all the raw tracks from the 2480 since bouncing tracks down on the 2480 degraded the sound noticeably and it’s only 24 track mixing. Sonar has like a 256 track limit or something rediculous like that so that would have suited me just fine. However I quickly quickly realized when running a 52 track mix with a number of plugins and effects that my computer was slightly underpowered for handling the load of the massive amount of music we had tracked. The track count added up quickly from all the backup vocal tracks we did and three mics for each primary guitar rhythm track and whatnot. Although Sonar worked fairly well and I could have gotten the job done, something fortunate happened to us that made me switch over to Pro Tools HD.

As I said in my last blog, a guy named Scott Spelbring happened to see my Backing Vocals II blog entry and dropped me a note on MySpace saying he liked my tracking writeups and offered to help with anything if we needed any. Scott runs a big studio not far from my house called Dragonfly Studios and he extended an invitation to have us bring a song or two down and mix it there. I’m sure you’ve heard Scott’s work before – Dave Matthews, SR-71, Bowling for Soup, Nikki Barr and of course he engineered and produced Plunge’s Hometown Hero – a great sounding record through and through. Jimmy and I decided we’d go down there together and bring two songs to mix, “Crush” and “Hot on Your Heels” and if we liked what we heard, we’d hire Scott to mix it for us which Scott was totally in to. Rob couldn’t make it that particular Sunday and the only way to get Steve to a mix session is to shoot him, throw him in the back of the truck, take him down there and prop him in a chair – Weekend at Bernie’s style! I exported all the tracks to broadcast wav files, burned them to a data disc and Jimmy and I drove down to Dragonfly one Sunday about 30 mins south of my house to a real, kickass professional recording studio.

Scott gave us a nice tour of the facility – top notch in every respect. Lot’s of great outboard gear, a Digidesign Pro Control fully automated desk and a killer live room. We spent all day there, most of the time was spent importing tracks into Pro Tools, explaining to Scott my mad methods on what was what, and setting up the mix, way more time than actual mixing. Regardless, at the end of the day we did get a mix and we really liked what we heard, Scott did an outstanding job on “Heels.” Scott is a freaking Jedi Master with Pro Tools and being in the software/computer business, I’ve been around computers long enough to have a keen sense of when somebody really knows what they are doing on a piece of software. Scott knows how to leverage all the nuances of Pro Tools, he moved about with ease and knew exactly what he was doing at all times. His wizardry was most impressive! Not only that, he has to be the world’s nicest most genuine guy too and he loves to talk tech so all three of us really hit it off. And above all else – he’s a dog person! Anyhow, when I compared Scott’s mix to my roughs from Sonar, levels, effects and EQ aside, there was something that was just better about the general sound and basic quality of Scott’s mix. It was difficult to explain. We didn’t do a whole lot of EQ at Scott’s – it just plain sounded better coming off Scott’s gear. I did a little research and found some white papers on Digidesign’s web site about the Pro Tools 48-bit mix bus and that helped explain why the Pro Tools mix was elementally much fatter and pro-sounding that the Sonar mixes. Sonar does not use a 48 bit mix bus and the difference was audible to me.

Jimmy and I decided we’d talk to the other guys and see what they thought about Scott mixing our record. We still had some tracking to do and Scott was going away for a month in May to do a USO tour running front of house for Plunge. So we agreed to talk when Scott got back and made a plan to have everything done ready to bring to Scott to mix by June 1st. I had a ton of work to do to export all our tracks and get them ready to be mixed in Pro Tools. I was ecstatic at the prospect of having Scott mix our record and so were the other guys.

In the mean time, as most everybody knows, Dean had put in his notice that he was leaving the band. He still had some rhythm tracks to do and all of his solos. Steve, Jimmy, Rob and I, while we regret Deans decision to leave, decided we would not release a new CD with guitar tracks played by a person who was no longer in the band. So all Dean’s tracks were scrapped. Luckily though, when Rob and I recorded all his rhythm tracks, we had to sort out all our guitar parts from the demos and right after Rob would finish his tracks for any song we were working on, we immediately recorded Dean’s parts as guide track so Dean could learn all the guitar parts he was supposed to play. Then we would run mixes of Rob playing the parts intended for Dean without Rob’s main tracks so Dean could come in prepared and there would be no question about what parts he was supposed to play. It worked out great for two reasons, Dean always came in prepared, and when he decided to leave, much by accident we already had good, well-engineered, produced guitar guide tracks that Rob had tracked for Dean. So I just flipped the virtual tracks labeled ‘Dean’ over to the ones labeled ‘Rob’ and we were done! Almost. Rob had to redo a few tracks as we did some of them slopplily because we thought Dean would be playing them anyhow so there was not much point in punching in and tightening things up here and there. So we left some stuff a little sloppy, one pass tracking style, thinking the only purpose they would serve was for Dean to learn his parts. Those rhythm tracks were retracked.

Turns out we needed those guide tracks after all and we only had to redo like three rhythm ‘Dean guide tracks’ of Rob’s, and Rob had to do all the solos that were earmarked for Dean. We knocked that stuff out in about two weeks of hard work and we were very happy with the result.

I also decided that since we spent the bulk of our time at Scott’s importing raw tracks and organizing data, and since I had witnessed the brilliance and amazing workflow of Pro Tools first hand, that I would get the software and get the projects ready in Pro Tools so all Scott would have to do was EQ and mix rather than organize my mess! It’s really tough to explain the difference a well engineered workflow makes in a software program – when you see it, it seems like everything just makes sense and everything is done so easily and intuitively. (The MIDI implmentation in Pro Tools has a long way to go but that’s a whole other story) So since I was way overdue for a new PC anyhow, I went and built myself a dual core Athlon 64 for about $1000 (tax deductable of course!) and got my new Pro Tools HD up and running in no time. I was importing raw wav files from Sonar and the VS-2480 like a mad scientist, finishing up bass parts here and there, reading the 750 page Pro Tools manual front to back and generally working like Edward Scissorhands trimming the hedges, every single night, every free moment – except for during Soprano’s and 24! I really wanted to be ready for when Scott came back to go right in and mix.

Then something quite remarkable and unexpected happened out of the blue one day – Beau Hill called!

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!

I see Dean mentioned the intro to Crush in his Glog that I made so I guess I’ll elaborate. As you live show attendees know, Dean does a little talkbox guitar intro and we start the song when it’s apparent he’s done talkboxing. Our original idea, can’t remember if it was Rob’s idea or mine, was to have a thirty second intro with a real orchestra sitting around tuning up with some talking and whatnot. Having a Crush on someone is sort of like an orchestra playing a deep classical movement. There are rushes of intensity, dense feelings, expectation, elation and of course dissapointment. Since the analogy of a Crush being like an orchestra with so many facets that can “play” anything, as anything can happen in a Crush with so many facets, that we thought it would be neat to hear the “orchestra of the Crush” warming up to get into Crush – get it?

Rob had worked with a guy previously that actually had a digital two track recording of a real orchestra warming up which he had emailed me like two years ago and neither one of us could find it. I looked on old PC’s, searched entire servers where I may have saved the file for “safe keeping” and I even searched backup tape archives – no luck. So I was faced with either buying an orchestra sample CD, none of which are reasonably priced, at least for what little I wanted to do, or finding royalty free samples and build my orchestra intro. I could see buying a sample library if I used orchestral sounds all the time but I couldn’t justify it just for this. I also have Tascam Giga3 and I used a couple of virtual instruments from there but the learning curve was pretty high and I was impatient, I get that way when I want an idea to flow. I hate it when a technical glitch gets in the way of creativity, it’s such a downer. I’ll read the very thick Giga manual for later because it looks very powerful.

After I started, I actually found myself working backwards from the first note of the song. I knew how I wanted to transition into the song, I could hear that in my head and I heard a few other things I wanted to use but it was easy to work backwards. I found some royalty free samples of oboes, violins, cellos, flutes, french horns and whatnot that sounded really good. The problem was, most of the stuff was single notes or two note trills. I had to tune each sample and create a melody from my tunings and and paste them together for each instrument to create a part that sounds like it was actually played by a musician, and then load the wav file I constructed for each instrument into a track. (which I could have done easily with Giga I’m sure if I had the patience to learn that first – which I didn’t because this idea was burning a hole in my pocket. I did use a couple of simple defaults though) I also got two royalty free samples of a real orchestras warming up like I wanted (thanks SuperGirl!) but they were sparse and had a lot of talking. Not really what I envisioned when I heard the samples by themselves. I took the talking peaks in the wav files and “de-normalized” them so the peaks were below the rest of the sample but I really had to beef them up with individual instrument parts to make them work for what I heard in my head.

I also wanted to take the listener on a musical journey through a few well-known emotions that you feel when you have a serious Crush on someone. I thought a lot about how I feel when I have had Crushes. The ones that are really up and down are the ones that you remember, if you have a Crush on someone, and they dig you, then it’s all happy. The fun starts when they are not sure they like you for whatever reason, maybe you’ve got Stinkfoot darlin’, or you’re moving to Montana soon to be a dental floss tycoon. Or maybe you listen to way too much Frank Zappa. Whatever – you know those kinds of crushes well right? There’s some happy stuff, cuz having a crush is cool at first and really happy when it works out (but that’s a different song – when it works out then it’s some love schmuv song) There’s anxiety if she’s not showing the same level of interest that you have in her, then there might even be some bludgeon you feel when you know she don’t like your python boot wearin’ ass. My idea was to use some subtle chord voicings against other chords to recreate tension and anxious feelings with the music. I tried to wrap all the wierd and wonderful range of emotions all up into about thirty five seconds and then ROCK right into Crush. It turned out really great, when I listen to it, it takes me through a snapshot of one little crush I had a while ago that didn’t work out in my favor. It’s cool to listen and feel like I expressed those feelings well because when I hear it, the familiarity of those feelings is right there, the music pulls those feelings right up. I’m very pleased with it. I let the boys listen to it and everybody was bowled over. Jimmy and Rob had a few suggestions they sent me over email. I printed those out so I won’t lose those too! When I marry that project over to the beginning of the real song, I’ll make those little changes. (Screenshot of the intro in Sonar 5)

For Dean’s parts, we used my Les Paul and the Marshall Plexi for the first track. I want the guitar on his side to be dark, heavy and thick without sounding like some dumb metal song. We started with his Explorer, but it’s a little brighter than the Les Paul and I didn’t want that to be the main sound on his side, so we did about twenty seconds and I decided to use record the Les Paul first and use the Explorer as a doubled track mixed in behind the Les Paul on his side of the mix. Usually we don’t double rhythm tracks, I think it takes away some of the overall timbre of the instrument and masks some of the individuality and articulation of the player. Now I think if you’re not such a good rhythm player, or your tone sucks, doubling can save your ass and make you sound like a rock god. Normally no need for doubling around here but since Rob’s sound on this song is going to be something along the lines of “The Rover” or “Royal Orleans” (Zeppelin) I needed to make sure Dean’s side is extra thick to allow that space for Rob while still keeping the song heavy. So we did one track with the Les Paul with three mics, one track with the Explorer with different mics through the same amp, then we set all the gain aside for the clean parts by using the trusty Hiwatt. There are some jangly guitars throughout the song so we got out the Strat and cranked up the Hiwatt – the Strat sounds absolutely dreamy through that amp. Of course I had to pull the inputs way back to clean it up. It reminded me of “Run to the Hills” Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pretty cool stuff. There were about three different parts repeating through the song that Dean did with the Strat, I love the sound of that guitar!

We then moved on to the talkbox. Dean has a Rocktron Banshee that, while is not the Heil talkbox made famous by Peter Frampton, Joe Perry and others, it sounds damn good and won’t blow your amp if the driver fails. The corksniffers would look down their nose at anything that is not a Heil but I challenge them to a taste test! No chance anyone can tell, the Banshee sounds that good. It does not even need an amp, it has it’s own mini amp built in. It has a little gain knob and we cut that back quite a bit from his live setting to make sure we get some nice tone showing through and we ran through the song punching him in where his talkbox parts are. I also had him do some chord layering in a couple of spots and double a couple of the single string runs here and there. We put a lot of talkbox in spots where it’s the main part and some layering where it will be mixed in the background for texture – love the way it came out. My plan was to have him double those parts too but the talkbox is such a spur of the moment feel thing, I quickly realized that there was no way to have him double the parts without him wanting to kill me for making him do stuff over and over until it matches good enough, there was just no way, the parts have too much individuality and expression – that’s the whole idea behind the talkbox and luckily my good sense overtook me and we didn’t double the talkbox parts – saved by my inner voice of reason for once. I can’t wait for you to hear it!