Gettin' it Dunn

Justin was in the shed pretty hard today.  He got about 15 songs done.

Nice job, Justin!

He was playing an Ibanez bass D-Ied through the M-Audio interface.

Now What?

Kassel finished the last two tracks today.  We had to work them out from scratch as we'd never really played them together, but both Mixtapes and Mott's new one Hold it Together went well.  I fiddled a bit with Audiosnap and Session Drummer 3, replacing the kick with a sample.  It sounded much better, I'm going to see if the same thing sounds good for the toms and maybe the snare as well.  With the drums done, it's Justin's time to play bass.  But the Pinyin Pals (myspace.com/thepinyinpals), Justin's side project of which I am also part, is unseasonably busy this week (Trois Minots, Thursday, 3$ and Gerts on Friday) so we might have to wait a bit for the bass.

I can't find my camera cable, so here's a picture from two days ago.  I swear he was wearing a different shirt today.

Bang It Out, Y'all

Day two of drums.  We got nine songs recorded, including Matt's tune "The Sweet Spot," a late addition.  It leaves only two or three to do tomorrow, ones that we have never played before as a band, so we'll see how that goes.  Here's Matt probably checking facebook right after we finished recording:

The Sweet Spot's piano scratch track was recorded on an 49-Key M-Audio USB controller that some kind hipster left at the apartment.  Perseus, Justin's song that had given us so many problems the day before, went well with a slightly slower scratch track.  Overall, the kit sounds alright, although I might try to replace the kick with a sample.  The toms sound a little muddy as well, but hopefully nothing that some eq won't fix.

Two Steps

Matt Kassel started recording drums today.  We got six tracks done!

The kit is a Tama Swingstar.  The mics: CAD KBM412 on the kick, SM58 on the snare, TSM 411s on the toms and on the batter head of the kick, and two ICM417s for overheads.  The hi-hat bleeds so much into the other mics that there was no need to mic it, and the bass drum was so boomy that I put a TSM411 on the batter side to try and get some "thwack" to blend it with.  I removed the grille of the SM58 a couple of songs in, effectively turning it into an SM57.  We also found we needed to muffle the toms a little bit with some tissue paper to get more definition on the hits.

Fine Tuning

I got new heads for the snare and the floor tom today.  We put them on and then Kassel played the drums while I tweaked the mic placement.  We recorded an example "Cigarette Two-Step" drum track, which I tried briefly to mix and eq.  I forgot my camera though, so here's a picture of Fesh:

Drums On

I moved the studio across the street today, in preparation for Kassel's drums.  I also got M-Audio's Bass and Drum Rig, and I had fun making electronic music most of the day (so did Mott).

The big CRT monitor I found while cleaning out the back room of the other apartment.  The monitors are M-Audio Studiopro 3s, the interface is an M-Audio Fast Track 8R.  The computer, which I just got this week, is an Acer with an Athlon 640 quad-core at 2.8Ghz, 4Gb RAM, and 1Tb hard drive.  It has none of the problems that my four year old laptop had running Cakewalk's Sonar 8.5 Producer edition (which I legally purchased from reputable merchants, if anyone asks).
Here's the kit with the mics on:

You can see I took the resonant head of the bass drum off.  Before I did, it sounded like a fish banging against cardboard.  Now it's like that, but louder.

Heat

Justin renamed his song 5-0 to Heat today, and he played the scratch track.  We have them all done now.

He thought it smelled bad in there (the cat's litter box is in the next room), so he brought some incense.  

It smelled worse after.

Try to Ignore The Cold

I fixed up the scratch tracks this morning, and added markers to indicate when the songs change between chorus and verse, etc.  It turns out we do have a couple of songs with tempo changes.  Also, it was super cold in there, so I bought a little portable heater.  It remains to be seen whether anything can make that room a decent temperature.

The heater is an UberHaus 5-fin oil radiator, running out of a wall-mounted 110V power supply.

Scratch Tracks

I brought the monitors and the audio interface over today, and got the scratch tracks done in a couple hours, minus 5-0, which I'm going to get Justin to do.  Here's my workspace:

I played my Martin through the interface and sang through the SM58.  At one point I was forced to stop and shotgun a beer, which made me forget most of the lyrics.
Here's the page of my song notebook where I wrote down the prospective songlist:

That's it for day 1!