Welp, I done bought me one a them newfangled Cubase 4 software packages and am ready to start recording the next album with it. As previously mentioned, I’ve used Cubase SX for a few years to flesh out demos and arrangements. It took about that long to really get the hang of it, but I think I’m now proficient enough to use it for the real deal.

Part of me relished the creative and performance urgency that came with booking studio time and recording everything in a week, under budget. The other part hated paying for hours of time devoted to editing tom fades, tweaking tempo changes and re-arranging and combining multiple takes into one good one – things I could have done at home for free. So here’s the plan:

Since Trey’s brother Chris uses the same software in his studio, and is extremely competent with all things drummy, we’ll track all of Trey’s drums there.

We’ll then take those tracking files and record the rest of the instruments and vocals at my place. There we can take as much time as we like to get all of the parts right. We’ll probably use a mix of real and modeled amps for the guitars and bass.

After all tracking is complete, I’ll take everything back to Chris for mixing. I’ll enlist Paul Williams to help out as well.

So really, all I have to pay for is about 8-10 hours of drums and 15-20 hrs. for final mixing. I’m confident the results will be as good as the last cd.

I’m looking forward to having a wide assortment of folks over to record at house. It’ll be extremely laid-back. Cubase has some great scoring features so generating sheet music for pianos, violins and horns won’t be a problem. I’ve written some very difficult piano parts this time (writing is easy, performing is hard), so hopefully I can twist Mark Pittman’s arm to lay down some human versions.

Should be a helluva time. I’ll keep ya posted once this thing gets going.