Hey Kids,

Things are finally swingin’ again for me. Mister Trey laid down all the drums for the next cd last Friday and Saturday at Junius Recording Co. His brother Chris engineered the sessions. In a short 10 hours for an extremely reasonable price, we had completed all of the drum tracks. Amazing work by the Treyster. He said he was a bit rusty, since being forced out of Sorta last winter, but I sure as hell couldn’t tell.

We only had three rehearsals prior to recording and many of the songs had melodies but no words (ref. Aerosmith’s ‘Making of Pump’). Still, Trey was able to capture all my ideas and demo programs, giving each song some real soul. He recorded against all of the demos and a mean ol’ click track, something he’s not fond of doing. Hell, I could release the demos with the new drum tracks and it would sound pretty damn good!

I returned home on Saturday night after a wicked b-day party at dada for an old TNDC friend, Charlie (another story – oh boy), plugged in the external drive and drooled over the 25+gigs of 11-track drum wave files. This summer is gonna be a blast.

Next steps for July:

• Write some words heh
• Record bass (eric, joe or me)
• Record some geetars (everyone)
• Record some lead vocals
• Record some piano parts played by real humans to replace my existing programmed arrangements.

In August, I’ll invite a cavalcade of musicians and singers to add final touches and embellishments. I hope to have everything tracked by Labor Day.
If you wanna participate, let me know! I chickened out of asking Freddie Jones to play a trumpet solo on a couple of the tunes the other night – What an honor that would be. I’m also looking for xylophone, percussion, strings (I’ve scored out all of those parts), theramin and backing/harmony vocals.

Look for more photos and updates as things progress. I’m very proud of the material I’ve written and can’t wait to share the final product with you!

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.