It's been awhile. Hi. I'm Greg. This is the Argyles, more or less. And this is how our very infrequent practices have been going. So what's up with the album? I'm glad you asked.
We had a baker's dozen worth of new songs when I decided we might as well record them, but I was still the only one who knew how to play them. Dowling (on drums) learned them as well, but Andrew and Justin were less available, and it was pretty slow adding the new ones into the rotation.
But we managed to get a few new ones in for a gig at Trois Minots on St. Laurent (like we play anywhere else). Ryan (sax) even drove out from Kingston, so we were a five-piece. We wrote some of his parts the afternoon before the show. It was a lot of fun. So I started preparing to record the drums for the album, which we would do at the practise space (when there were no loud bands playing next door).
The first part of this was treating the room somewhat, so I bought a bale of acoustic insulation from Home Depot and built four 3'x4' acoustic panels, then hung them on the wall strategically to minimize unwanted reverb in the room. The room isn't square, which is a good thing acoustically because sounds bounce around between parallel walls. I wound up hanging a blanket above the drumkit to lower the ceiling of the room a bit.
Then I brought in my (not so) mobile recording rig, my Acer PC, M-Audio FastTrack Ultra 8R, and some little monitors. I brought my CAD drum mic kit, and clamped them on the toms and in front of the kick. I used a Sennheiser e935 on the snare, and eventually paired my Rode NT1a with my friend
Martin's to use as overheads. The drums (Mapex Saturn series, Alex from Parapraxis's set) sound nice on their own, so for once I felt like they were working with me and I wasn't just faithfully capturing the sound of a crappy drumset.
Then Dowling decided he wasn't going to record drums, which was unfortunate. So I had to figure out how to play all these songs well enough to record them, which took time because I am not the world's best drummer and didn't know how to play what I heard in my head sometimes. I banged out some scratch tracks and then it was days and days of practice, not even pretending I was ready to record yet. When I finally felt ready I set up Andrew's keyboard as a midi controller, so I could start and stop recording without moving from behind the drums, then went song by song, doing about ten takes of each. Then I did a cursory listen and picked 3-6 good takes to keep.
Once I finished, I brought my recording gear back to my apartment and went verse by verse, chorus by chorus, picking the best take for each part. Then I stitched them together, which wasn't easy considering there were as many as 5 takes being used, with 15 edits per track. I haven't processed them at all yet, but they sound good and the edits are transparent. Hopefully, no one will be able to tell they are in fact Frankenstein's monsters instead of the work of a skilled drummer.
Oh, and the title I came up with for the new album is:
Mean Times
It means a few things to me; we've all graduated and waiting for the next phase of our lives to start, so this is what the Argyles are doing in the meantime. Also, many people have left the city and those that stayed are working part or full time, so the hangouts don't push the extremes of Rage and Chill. They're mostly average (mathematically, mean) times. Third, the material and the music is louder, more agressive, and angrier than the first album. Playing them makes me feel mean. So that's why I like it, at least for now.
