Recording report: 2/25/09

In attendance: Jen, Lexi, Rod, Steve. Engineer: Joe

Still more good progress - Jen knocked out all her remaining keyboard parts on Wednesday night. We're getting close to the finish line now. We tracked keyboards for four songs: "Catch and Release," "Don't Look Down," "Pretend," and "Edge of Forever." Jen was well rehearsed and played with a lot of focus and energy. Now the songs really sound like the Aviation Blondes.

Jason decided to stay home drinking with Lucy again this week, so engineering duties were in the capable hands of Joe Stile.

Joe set things up so that we could record audio and midi simultaneously. For the layman, that means we recorded the literal sound of what Jen was playing like any other audio track you'd record, but at the same time we also captured the neutral digital information of the notes she played, velocity and other data, so that if we want to use a different sound - any sound at all - we can change the parts she played to any sound we want when we mix. We haven't decided yet whether we're going to take a more purist attitude, i.e. that the CD should sound as much like the live band as possible, therefore we should use exactly the same keyboard sound Jen would play live; or whether we should take advantage of the ability to use some other sound, for example a really lush piano or strings. It's sort of hard to explain if you're not familiar with the digital music world, but basically, on the computer we have access to samples and sounds that aren't programmed into Jen's actual keyboard, if that makes any sense. Anyway, we'll save that debate for another day. In the meantime, we got really good performances out of Jen and that's the important thing.

Sorry this entry is a little short - I think I burned myself out writing some of those super-long ones.

So at this stage we're going to take a little break from recording so we can rehearse for our show on March 14. We recently booked two more shows - April 24 at the Doublewide and May 23 at the Thunderbird. So we're about to become a fully active band again, FINALLY. Freakin' hallelujah.