Blog Studio Journal Archive

The past couple months were kinda slow in the getting shit done department. With the holidays and some other scheduling conflicts we only managed to get in a few weekends of actual recording. The good news is we’re closing in on finishing up guitars and have the rest of the days we need scheduled for this month. After that we move on to vocals.

We would absolutely love to be getting this done faster but everyone involved in this project has other things going on where they actually make the money needed to survive. The donations we’ve received go a long way towards paying for the new album, but that’s all we’re using it for. When it comes to rent/bills/etc, everyone’s kinda on their own. So whether its fishing for Alaskan King Crab or doing pet dry cleaning for the rich and famous… we gotta do what we gotta do.

I’m hoping that playing rock music will someday be a viable career option. Until then it’s more like playing the lottery and winning just enough to buy some more lottery tickets.

We nailed down some more recording days over the next month or so. The live stream will probably be up for most of them so remember to check in and see what we’re up to. Here’s the schedule:

Sunday Nov. 22 @ 11am
Monday Nov. 23 @ 7pm
Monday Nov. 30th @ 7pm
Wednesday Dec. 2nd @ 7pm
Saturday Dec. 19th @ 11am
Sunday Dec 20th @ 11am

The best way to get notified when the stream goes live is to follow us on Twitter. If you’re not into Twitter, you can still find our latest update here on the site (in the right sidebar) or over on our Facebook page.

You can also stay updated through email by signing up for our newsletter.

We’re keeping all of our photos from the studio in this Flickr set. We just added some from last weekend’s guitar sessions.

Here it is as a sweet slideshow:

We had some issues last weekend and weren’t able to get everything set up for the live stream. Apologies to anyone who tried to get on.

The good news is that guitar tones were “dialed in” and a bunch of stuff was recorded. I wasn’t in the studio for these sessions so I can’t tell you much more than that. But we’ll be back in for more guitars on Oct 17 and Oct 24.

The live stream will be up for those two sessions, so mark your calendars.

A little later tonight Tony will be back in the studio to start recording guitar tracks. We have some logistical issues to work out so the stream may be up starting tonight or it may have to wait until tomorrow. Recording will be going on all weekend so either way there will be something to watch at some point. Tonight there will likely be a lot of knob fiddling and what have you before actual recording starts so you might not end up missing too much.

See if the stream is live here »

Oh and we kinda just launched a new music store last night and released a (sort of) new album. Check it out.

We’ll have more info on that soon. It was kind of a “soft launch” with minimal fanfare, mainly because we just don’t have to time to create much fanfare these days. But it’s live and open for “bizness.” We now have all of our releases (except the self titled album) available directly from us.

We made a small change to the donation structure that may affect you if you donated $25 or more to the cause.

Traffic on the live stream (from the studio where we’re recording our new album) was a little less than we expected. Considering the fact that this has become somewhat of a global effort, it’s not too surprising that people from halfway around the world aren’t able to tune in live on our schedule.

We still think the live stream is pretty cool (even with the long periods of down time) and realized that it might be better suited to be used not only to let the people who’ve gotten involved in this project see where their money is going, but also to let casual fans and even total randoms into the studio with us to see what all the commotion is about. Maybe they’ll even want to get involved themselves. And that works out well for all of us.

To put it simply, the live stream from the studio is now public.

If you’re one of the fine ladies and/or gentlemens who’ve already thrown at least $25 our way (Bronze level), you might be feeling a bit let down that the live stream is no longer the exclusive secret society it once was. That’s understandable. So in addition to still having full access to the live stream, you’re also going to get a free copy of the new album on CD.

And just so our Silver donors don’t feel left out, in addition to the signed and numbered copy of the CD you’re already getting, we’re gonna throw in a limited edition promotional mini-poster (also signed and numbered of course). This will be a totally new poster and will be a different design than the (non-mini) one at the $100 level.

Finally, there’s one last change that affects everyone: Instead of getting your free download of the album in “high quality mp3 format” you’ll be able to choose from a whole list of audio formats, including FLAC, Apple Lossless and Ogg Vorbis. All these options will also be available to anyone who wants to wait until the album is released to buy it.

How is this modern miracle of technology possible?

We’re about to launch a new music store that includes all those formats. Not exactly a miracle I guess. More like breaking news. You heard it here first.

Meanwhile head over to the current store while it’s still there and check out the updated list of donation levels.

You knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

So, the plan is to record 15 songs. We’ve finished recording drums for 13 of them. The last two need a bit more “finishing up” than we thought, so we decided to move on to recording bass. In the meantime, we’ll work on the unrecorded songs on our own time instead of trying to figure things out in the studio. There’s plenty of work to do with the 13 song we have, so things will keep moving forward. Unfortunately for the studio journal that means we can’t quite call the drums completed yet.

If you’ve been watching the live stream, we commend you on your patience and willingness to endure less than stellar audio and video quality. We’re working on a new streaming method that should improve things a bit. During the last drum session I thought I had it set up right, but I heard from a bunch of people after the fact that it wasn’t working. Apologies for the non-functioning stream that night. The good news is that we just uploaded a full take of one of the songs we recorded last week. It was “filmed” with a better-than-webcam-quality camera so you can actually see (and hear) what’s going on.

Gods and Profits (Full Length Drum Take)

And in his free time, Mike put together this video and set it free on the information superhighway. Surf on over and check it out. (Or just click play)

Things have been kinda quiet around here studio-journal-wise. A few of our vacations happened to be scheduled right around the same time so we haven’t back in the studio except for a day last week where Rob and I did some drum comping. That’s where we go through all the takes of each song and put together a final master take with the best parts from all the takes.

In the studio comping drums

The good news is we’ll be back in the studio starting tonight and every night thereafter until Wednesday night, at which point we will hopefully be done recording drum tracks. We’ll be streaming live again at Ustream.TV. If you donated $25 or more you should have received an email with instructions on how to view the live stream. If you didn’t get an email about this, please let us know.

To put that in a format that’s a little easier to read, here’s the schedule for this week:

• Monday, August 17 @ 7pm ’til ???
• Tuesday, August 18 @ 7pm ’til ???
• Wednesday, August 19 @ 7pm ’til ???

Even if you didn’t donate at the $25 level, we still have some cool stuff that everyone can check out including a video that Mike put together of the drum sessions so far (DV quality, not from the stream footage) and the recorded versions of past streams.

Here’s Mike’s video:

And here’s the latest recording we have from the live stream. More can be found on our Ustream videos page.

While we were recording drums, Jay set up some cameras and did some really cool time lapse videos of us.

More videos at Sinch TV »

On Saturday June 27 we officially started tracking for our new album.

Equipment was loaded in. A web cam was set up. Drums were tuned and miked. Guitar amps were put into isolation booths so as to not record guitars through the drum mics as that would be counterproductive and would have rendered the drum tracks somewhat useless. With guitar and bass sounds safely being piped through our headphones (so we can all hear what’s going on) we warmed up a bit and started recording.

I didn’t keep exact track of what order we recorded songs in or on what days, but I do know we started with a song that, as of right now, is called Gods and Profits. Or Gods and Prophets. Honestly I hadn’t really thought about it until I had to actually spell it. The first song is always a little weird because I’m still settling into the studio, getting used to the sound in the headphones and the click track (although we had been practicing with a click for a while before going in). But I got through it (obviously) and started banging shit out.

Over that weekend and a few follow up sessions on weekday evenings we got the drums for 11 songs recorded. These are all working titles, and some of them are obviously going to be changed.

• Gods and Profits
• Targets on the Range
• Cause and Effect
• Thizzle
• Over-medication
• One Part Deal
• Easier Said Than Done
• Instructions How to Die
• Pancake Day
• One More Time
• Speaking in Code

Because of some scheduling issues we had to end this session without getting drums for all 15 new songs. Basically that means we had to take down the kit and move all our stuff out of the tracking room, so we’ll have to set it all up again later to get the rest of the songs done. In the meantime, we’re gonna start recording bass for the 10 we do have.

We’ll be coming back in sometime in August for Drum Session #2. The songs we still need are Novelty, Pullest of Tubes, Greenlight, Shine and we may revisit Gods and Profits since it was the first song I did and my playing got better over the course of the session.

Again, we can’t thank everyone enough for helping to make this possible. We’re so excited to be finally getting some stuff recorded and really happy with what we’ve got so far. This is only the beginning.

More photos from the studio »