So, the album is coming together nicely. All of the vocals are sung, and I’ve been working on comping them and picking out the best parts. I found a great horn player, Bill Scholl, and we got together a while ago and recorded some ideas for the song “Drive Me”. After listening to the parts we laid down, we decided they might work a little better played less staccato than they were, so we’re getting back together soon to try that out. They sound awesome so far though! I’ll also be visiting Chris Fisher’s studio again to re-amp all the electric guitar tracks. I recorded them all direct using amp emulators (Amplitube 2 and Eleven), and while they sound pretty good, they’re not quite as good as I’d like. So I’ll run each guitar part that I’ve already recorded out from the computer into a real amp, throw a mic in front of a real speaker cabinet, and record that back in. It’ll be awesome, if not tedious for 12 songs, each of which has between 6 and 20 or so tracks… I also added some tambourines to a few songs, and still might throw some more on a few others. They have a way of taking a song up a level and giving it a nice rhythmic groove. Once all that is finished, I’ll focus on getting good drum sounds and putting together the final mixes, or maybe even bringing in someone to help at that point. But really, it’s starting to sound like an album for real now. I can’t wait to be done and get this out for the world to hear it!
Now I just need to come up with a name. Two actually – one for the album and maybe even one for the “band”… Any ideas?
In other news, I’m looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of Pro Tools that includes actual support for Windows 7 (maybe it’ll run without crashing every 20 minutes!), but that’s gonna have to wait ’til I finish this album since it also drops support for my MBox! Not cool. The preamps in that thing sound pretty good and I’m not happy about the prospect of an otherwise perfectly good piece of hardware becoming obsolete just like that. But I suppose that’s how things work in this world, unfortunately.
