Tracktion continued to work flawlessly as we tracked Da Glo Me, a noisy rocker with a decidedly 70s feel in spots. After a few takes Tony came to the conclusion that he needed to not hit the crashes so hard and Kevin decided to play this song with his fingers instead of a pick. After four or five takes though, his hand and wrist were in agony. Russell lobbied to stop, but Kevin elected to switch back to a pick and soldier on. After working out one of the transitions, they locked into each other and recorded a keeper. The last loud part is not quite as tight as it could be and one of Tony's fills isn't played exactly as he intended, but we all agreed that it was a pretty rockin' take. They ran through Hugo 808 a couple of times, but it was pretty obvious they were tired and Kevin's hand was giving him problems. We all decided to quit while we were ahead.
April 18.
We reconvened at House of Tony (H.O.T.) to continue working on Hugo 808. Before we started though, we listened to Da Glo Me from our last session and decided that it was, indeed, still sounding pretty kick-ass. I settled in as "tape-op" for the tracking. Actually, I suppose I was the keyboard-op since all I had to do was push the "R" key and say "rolling." (Even though nothing is actually rolling -- maybe I should say "hard drive spinning?") A number of takes were pretty good, but no one really felt like they were tight and crisp enough. Hugo is a brand new song and has a pretty difficult bassline with lots of notes played really fast and the bass and drums have to be spot on. After 10 or so takes, things were deteriorating to the point of diminishing returns. Instead of beating our heads against the wall, we decided to try again later in the week. This is, after all, why they decided to record at home: no time or money pressures.
April 24.
We optimistically scheduled two hours to get bass and drums down for Hugo 808. The first take was pretty good despite the fact the the arrangement was not quite right (Kevin went into the fuzz bass part too early) and Russell seemed to think so too. Quoth he: "You'll probablly want to do it again, but I think that was the one." Tony and Kevin did, indeed, want to do it again and take two was marginally better. While we took a quick break (so Kevin could give his hand a rest), Tony noticed a Great Blue Heron in the marsh out back of his house and took as a sign of good luck. It may have been, because the third take was even better. Kevin pretty much nailed the super-fast rolling bass part Tony wasn't too hard on himself about his fills. They tried one more take but screwed it up right at the end, so we decided to leave well enough alone and use Take #3. Russell wanted to try a compressor on the bass track, so we threw the Digital Fishphones Blockfish plugin on it. After a couple minutes of tweaking, we managed to smooth out the bassline AND emphasize the attack a bit. We listened back to both Hugo and Da Glo and there was much rejoicing and high fives all around. I archived our progress so far to a different hard drive and burned a CD for off-site storage. As Tony says, "DR for the auditor." I burned a drum and bass mix for Russell so he could practice his parts for recording next weekend.
May 2.
I helped Russell and Tony worked on some guitar stuff tonight. We dicked around with sounds for the better part of two hours and the best we got was just OK. The 421 sounded a bit better than a 57 on Russell's Hiwatt. I thought it sounded pretty good but Russell kept tweaking the angle of the mic to get something better. We ended up going with the 421 about six inches back and not quite straight on to the speaker. He managed to quickly lay down an acceptable take of Da Glo Me, but he really wasn't happy with the sound. "It isn't bad; it just isn't great or cool or interesting." He kept muttering about wanting it more "expansive." I suggested trying B1 LDC as more of room mic or maybe trying another amp. But all that would have taken time and Tony needed to hit the road for Chicago, so we called it a night. A couple of days earlier, I had played the drums and bass tracks for my engineer friend Jon Terrones and he was very impressed with our sounds. I've been listening to a lot of recordings and comparing tehm against ours. I think our sounds stand up to just about everything. Oh yeah, the more I hear Tony's "questionable" fill on Da Glo, the more I love it.
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