That's What I'm *Bleeping* Talking About!!!

Brian, Michael and I got together on Friday for a little bit of recording. After a couple of hours, we were able to get a nice bright and highly spirited acoustic guitar track down for 'Stars of Mendecino'. It was a difficult track to nail down, mainly because we were trying to get a better take than the original track -- but unfortunately there was no click or rhythm track for the first eight bars or so, so getting it to match exactly to the original took quite a bit of work and patience.

An exhuberant Charlie can be heard in the outtakes after finally nailing the track down.

CT
DP

Once More... With Feeling

So tonight, Brian and I got together without Charlie and Clint (they eat all the pizza and drink all the beer anyway) to work on some recording. It wasn't a clandestine rendezvous or anything, it's just that there's work to do and why wait 'til Thursday? So we worked on finishing up the mopey-shoegazer version of A Safer Hiding Place. The only part I had to do was a solo. I honestly had no real idea of what I was going to do when we started tonight, but I had a basic construction of where to play around since the song already has a solo on the regular version. So it gave me a starting place, but it finishes differently. Which is good since the other solo is by Charlie, so it's cool that the two are slightly different.

Well, sometimes recording is like fishin'.

You gotta keep throwing 'em back in the water when they're just not right until you catch a good one.


Recording a solo that you haven't even really figured out yet is a pain in the ass normally. I usually fuck it up time after time and get all pissed off, but tonight I didn't. It took several takes before we got something that was good, but I didn't get all cunty. It all went nice and easy. Each take had minor differences since I was still making it up on the fly, but the problem was, I would throw a clam in there and go to some minor note when I shouldn't or just not catch the right fret when I wanted it, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah....

We just went at it figuring, we'll get something eventually, and if not... oh well.

And we got it.

Plus I got to mess around with sound.

I used THE SELECTOR! to have two amps playing. I put the Marshall and the Line6 facing each other about 3 feet apart mic'd dead center. I put the Marshall on my regular hi-gain setting, and the Line6 on hi-gain with a Matchless setting and a chorus effect. Then I ran my Les Paul through some additional distortion from Brian's Line6 Bass POD into the Marshall. So one amp was distorted and phased in contrast to the straight hi-gain sound out of the other amp. Nice and full blend.

We dones good.

You'll hear it eventually.


MM
DP