Blog Studio Journal Archive

Pre-production (with Walter) was finished on Friday. We now have a list of 13 songs that we were planning on recording, starting next week.

The bad news is… we won’t be starting next week anymore.

A series of events transpired last week involving Roadrunner Records which resulted in us being unable to start production on the album as we had planned to do on June 11. What that series of events was is still somewhat unclear to us, but we are being assured that, although this does kind of suck for us, the reason behind it is a good one. And one that will benefit us in the long run. It comes down to bad timing I guess. As you may have noticed, we’re masters of bad timing.

I know this probably doesn’t make much sense. It really doesn’t have anything to do with us. It’s more of a company-wide thing that is effecting everything that Roadrunner is involved in right now. We don’t really know much else about it at this point. Apparently, it’s pretty top secret. Shh.

Anyway, so it looks like we won’t be going to Nashville for at least another month or so. We’ll know more as things with the label get worked out.

The good news is… We will probably be playing a show or two in the meantime. There is a pretty cool show coming up in the next few weeks that we may be taking part in. We’ll know more about that within the next few days.

Getting back to those 13 songs I mentioned… When we finally get to Nashville, the plan is to record 12-13 songs for the album. As of right now we have these 13 pretty much ready to go: (tentative titles)

Tabula Rasa, 433 Hypothetical Situations, Die in Fall, Selfish Reasons, Social Anxiety Disorder, Pain, Uniforms, The Silent Acquiescence of Millions, Massinuum, Untitled Acoustic Song, Plasma, Bitmap, and Me Parade.

But now with the extra time that we have, a new song or two will probably be written and could possibly replace something from the list. So, don’t go getting that tattooed on your ass or anything.

We’re getting ready to wrap up pre-production with Walter and head down to Nashville to get started with Malcolm (Springer). The tentative starting date is (no later than) June 11.

I know this studio journal thing probably hasn’t been too exciting yet, but once we get into the recording, things should get a little more interesting. At least, that’s the theory.

Not too much has happened since this past week. Walter stayed home and we worked on a new song that’s been sort of half-finished for the past few months. It’s pretty close to being finished now. No title for this one yet. We’ll just call it Untitled 4.

We also got started on our EPK (Electronic Press Kit). This is just something that we’re doing for Roadrunner that will be sent out to the media (magazines, radio, etc.) as a promotional type thing. It was nice to get a little break and do something different for a day. When it’s finished it will be about 5-7 minutes long. We’ll probably be posting some clips from it as we get farther along and the whole thing will eventually be available for download from the site. So far we filmed interviews with each band member and got some rehearsal footage.

We’ll be getting together with Walter again sometime within the next few weeks to kind of finalize everything we’ve done with him. Other than the 10-11 songs that Walter worked on with us, there are a few other ones that we’ll be working on before we get into the studio: The Silent Acquiescence of Millions, Maybe a Purpose, and two songs that were originally supposed to appear on the Project:Bluebird EP, An Author for the Authority and Breathing Cliche.

Unless any other new songs are written between now and when we get into the studio, we’ll be going in with about 16 songs ready to go. The total time for the 16 songs clocks in roughly somewhere around 65-70 minutes.

More arrangements. Lots of rehearsing. A visit from the manager and the A&R representative. Another acoustic type song in the works, possibly to replace the other one we were working on last week. The one we were doing last week is tentatively being called “Stolen.” The one we worked on this week doesn’t even have a tentative title yet.

Here is an updated list of the 13 songs we have been working on:

Tabula Rasa, Pain, 433, Plasma, Uniforms, Me Parade, Die in Fall, Selfish Reasons, Bitmap, Maasinuum, Stolen, and Untitled 3.

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week doing more pre-production. Some more work was done on the 6 songs we worked on last week, as well as two others: Die in Fall and Hambread (tentative titles).

This brings us past the halfway point with about 6 songs left to work on. These are: Maasinumb, An Author For the Authority, Breathing Cliche, Maybe a Purpose, The Silent Aquiescence of Millions and Bitmap (once again, some of these are tentative titles). We also have about 2 more albums worth of unfinished ideas and random parts so we may end up writing some more new songs along the way.

It was a short “session” this week but we still got a lot done… including setting up the tempos for each song and recording them to a click track. This is more for me (Dan/drums) to just get used to playing them with the click so that when we get into the studio I don’t even really have to think about it. (For anyone who doesn’t know, a click track is just like a metronome kind of thing that the drummer usually listens to in headphones while recording the drums. It just keeps you in the right tempo.)

Also, Jamie and Walter put together the beginnings of another new song… just acoustic guitar and vocals so far, but it sounds good already. And I know I mentioned getting some pictures up this week but that’s not happening just yet. There isn’t much to look at anyway. But we’ll definitely get some pictures up here soon.

We’ll be doing another 3-4 days next week.

Last Tuesday we officially started pre-production for the new album. Walter (Schreifels) came down from NY and stayed in Doylestown for a few days. He’s gonna be doing most of the pre-production with us over the next few weeks.

For anyone who’s wondering what “pre-production” is:

Basically, this is the time before we get into the studio where we rehearse and go through all of our material and make sure we know exactly what we’re doing. Sort of like fine-tuning everything, so that when we do get into the studio, we can just do it and not waste any time trying to figure things out. It is very similar to the pre-production you would do on a movie, where you read through the script and figure out where all the locations are and what the camera moves are going to be. You just want to make sure once the tape starts rolling, you know exactly what you’re trying to do.

Last week we worked on the overall structure of some (about 6) of the songs. Basically, we just fucked around with the arrangements a bit. After we get through doing that with all of the songs, we’ll go in a little deeper and really get specific with where everything is supposed to be: drum fills, vocal harmonies, etc.

These are the 6 songs we worked on so far:

(keep in mind some of the new songs are still untitled so we’ll be using temporary titles)

Tabula Rasa, 433, Pain, Uniforms, Plasma, and Me Parade

We’re all pretty happy with how everything is coming together. Pretty much everything has at least a slight change somewhere in the arrangement of the song, so even if you’ve heard some of the songs before you can expect to hear something different (and hopefully better) when the album comes out.

Walter is coming back down tomorrow and we’ll be working all day tomorrow and most of the day Wednesday. Expect another update later this week, hopefully with a few pictures this time.

For the past 3 weeks we have been writing and demoing new material for our upcoming Roadrunner debut.

Things are going very well. We currently have 7 new songs completed, and we’ll continue to write for at least another couple of weeks.

We’re all very happy with the new material. We’ve never been able to focus on our music like we’re able to now, and I think you’ll definitely be able to tell by listening to the new stuff. There’s a lot of different things going on with each song, and i think this stuff is a lot different than what we’ve done in the past. But at the same time, it’s still us and it’s still just as intense and as true to ourselves as anything we’ve ever done.

You’ll just have to wait and see.

We should be getting into the studio within the next month or so. This section will be constantly updated with news of whats going on in the studio and most likely some photos and video clips of us working on the album