Dribbling on myself...
Someone asked what a dribble castle is. I can only say that if you haven't made a dribble sand castle on the beach, then you truly, truly, are missing out on one of life's great joys.
Behold!
Okay, enough languishing in my glorious memories of the beach.
Last night a little work hiccup (which is about as politely as I can translate Preston's voice mail) caused us to cancel our scheduled rehearsal, so Randy & I met and worked on "Everything To Me". As I read the latest issue of Rolling Stone with The Police on the cover (which is strange because I haven't read Rolling Stone in 3 years and this summer I've read the last three - Amy Winehouse is a gifted singer but a total trainwreck, by the way... which reminds me of a total trainwreck I dated in highschool, but that's another blog post... or a song... or-) Randy mixed away on the drums trying to breathe a little "roominess" into the sound. We had made a very big decision to use the piccolo snare on this song (a very thin, bright snare drum) and now we were regretting it a bit. Everything had a "cardboard box wrapped in rubber bands) sound to it (as I helpfully described - Randy loves it when I give helpful descriptions). We made a copy of the snare drum track and used a bunch of tricks to thicken it up - pitching it down, EQ the crap out of it, throwing in a ton of gated reverb... finally we got it down to a livelier sound.
Next I went into the booth and added a little tambourine and shaker to the song. This was fun because I'd spent a lot of vacation time thinking about this part (seriously, that's fun to me, so you shut up!). Each section was to have a different treatment - double time accents on the chorus/intro, single hits on the 4 beat of the verse, and 2 & 4 accents on the "in-between-the-chorus-&-guitar-solo" sections. Got it? Took a couple of takes, and afterwards my wrist was sore (let the jokes begin!). In the end it really loosened up the rhythm and added a little bounce to the overall mix.
At this point we brought my guitar down in the mix a bit (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!) and this lightened up the overall mid range. I played a little supplemental tom sound on the octapad. Preston's bass is just DIGGING IN on this song - sounds like one of those massive earthworm monsters from the movie Dune. Not the book Dune, the movie. *cough* Anyhoo, we played with some of the vocal balances and a few hours later we were both ready to NOT listen to the song again for a while.
I think we got it much closer to where it needs to be, which is good... a bit of deconstruction and reconstruction. I think we made progress which is good.
A few more songs, some artwork and then it's off to the presses!
Dave
Behold!
Okay, enough languishing in my glorious memories of the beach.
Last night a little work hiccup (which is about as politely as I can translate Preston's voice mail) caused us to cancel our scheduled rehearsal, so Randy & I met and worked on "Everything To Me". As I read the latest issue of Rolling Stone with The Police on the cover (which is strange because I haven't read Rolling Stone in 3 years and this summer I've read the last three - Amy Winehouse is a gifted singer but a total trainwreck, by the way... which reminds me of a total trainwreck I dated in highschool, but that's another blog post... or a song... or-) Randy mixed away on the drums trying to breathe a little "roominess" into the sound. We had made a very big decision to use the piccolo snare on this song (a very thin, bright snare drum) and now we were regretting it a bit. Everything had a "cardboard box wrapped in rubber bands) sound to it (as I helpfully described - Randy loves it when I give helpful descriptions). We made a copy of the snare drum track and used a bunch of tricks to thicken it up - pitching it down, EQ the crap out of it, throwing in a ton of gated reverb... finally we got it down to a livelier sound.
Next I went into the booth and added a little tambourine and shaker to the song. This was fun because I'd spent a lot of vacation time thinking about this part (seriously, that's fun to me, so you shut up!). Each section was to have a different treatment - double time accents on the chorus/intro, single hits on the 4 beat of the verse, and 2 & 4 accents on the "in-between-the-chorus-&-guitar-solo" sections. Got it? Took a couple of takes, and afterwards my wrist was sore (let the jokes begin!). In the end it really loosened up the rhythm and added a little bounce to the overall mix.
At this point we brought my guitar down in the mix a bit (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!) and this lightened up the overall mid range. I played a little supplemental tom sound on the octapad. Preston's bass is just DIGGING IN on this song - sounds like one of those massive earthworm monsters from the movie Dune. Not the book Dune, the movie. *cough* Anyhoo, we played with some of the vocal balances and a few hours later we were both ready to NOT listen to the song again for a while.
I think we got it much closer to where it needs to be, which is good... a bit of deconstruction and reconstruction. I think we made progress which is good.
A few more songs, some artwork and then it's off to the presses!
Dave
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