Recording report: 3/25/09

Some new recording activity to report on today. Daryl finished all his backup vocals last night and Dave added extra percussion to “Don’t Look Down.” That means 5 of the 7 songs are completely tracked and ready to mix.

Daryl did backup vocals for “Pretend,” “The Stranger in You,” and “Catch and Release.” He has a deep voice and thus provides the bass anchor on choruses and other places where we do 4-part vocal arrangements. There are actually a lot of places throughout these songs where all four people in the band who sing (Lexi, Jen, Daryl, and me) are all singing at once - more than I thought. There is a lot of singing on this CD in general - I think that’s going to be one of the main impressions people will have right away when they hear the finished product. It already sounds quite striking in the raw, unmixed tracks. We're definitely a singing kind of band. Some bands are shy about singing. Not us!

“Pretend” only has Daryl singing on two lines in the bridge, so that took about a minute. “Stranger” features Daryl’s voice solo on the second verse and then all the choruses from that point on. He hasn’t been singing on the choruses when we’ve played the song live, so we had to take a minute and figure out exactly what his part is. We determined that it’s basically a mirror of Lexi’s part, an octave lower. Daryl picked it up quickly and knocked it out. That just left “Catch and Release,” which Daryl has never sung before, but again he picked it up quickly. On this one his part is a mirror of my harmony vocal, an octave lower. Every chorus on this song has different lyrics so I wrote some of it down for Daryl to refer to as he sang, and he did a nice job of matching all the eccentric phrasing of the various choruses.

So now that his voice is on the tracks, the final vocal ingredient is in place and there’s a complete, full-band sound to the songs.

Dave came in to add some tambourine and shaker to “Don’t Look Down” and arrived just as Daryl was finishing up. There was some discussion about which parts of the song needed what. Dave and Jason settled on a system where the tambourine and shaker alternate sections so that for the most part they’re never playing simultaneously on the same part of the song. So the prechorus has shaker, the chorus has tambourine, the bridge has both, and the verse has neither. Being a drummer, Dave had no trouble maintaining the rhythm even though there was a lot of fast 16th-note stuff going on. Percussion is harder than people realize, especially tambourine. You really have to be able to maintain an even rhythm because those high frequencies cut right through the mix, so discrepancies or little variations really stick out. And it’s tiring to the arm, too. But Dave nailed it in one or two takes, pro that he is. I think the additional percussion adds a nice new layer to the song, really brightens it up.

A week from Sunday is our big guest vocal session for “Edge of Forever.” We’re inviting pretty much everybody we know who can sing (plus some who can’t). Should be fun. I have to figure out how organized or disorganized that will be. Probably better if it has some structure instead of a big free-for-all…we’ll see. Also coming soon is a session with the horn section from The Metropolitans (Rocco, Jonny and Michael) who have agreed to add their magic to “Don’t Look Down.”

So we’re really getting close to being finished with tracking. Just in time for the nice weather, too. Life is good.