Loading gear into the studio
Excited to unload and start making noise!!
Being Released
I remember as a kid the major effect music had on me, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that magic somehow. Not only did the melodies, chord structures and instrumentation of all the 80’s music that I consumed stir me…but the sonic characteristics of all those songs had me captivated just as well. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that the “mix” of a song was just as huge to my senses as the song itself. I was clueless to know it was someone’s job to make all those parts blend together. I didn’t give it much thought, but I must have assumed that bands naturally sounded the way they do on a recording, like it’s some effortless endeavor to wake up and go record a hit song as if they were just waking up to make some toast.
I was so ignorant, not giving any thought to the amount of work, and insight, and frustrations it must have taken to create just one of those thousands of songs I fell in love with. There’s something very special about being an innocent listener, or an audience member, or a consumer, or a reactor to any kind of art. It’s good that we don’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes, if we did it would lose some of that magic. I’m glad I didn’t know how hard this was as a kid.
I took a very slow road to discovery in what I really wanted to do in the music world. My path has been sporadic, unplanned, slow moving, yet always full of some kind of unexplained desire to keep doing it. Mine is not any different than any other musician's story, except maybe just slower.
I started out with the desire to be a singer but really ended up as a guitarist, and then learned how to engineer and record music, and through all of that picked up some producing skills, and lastly gravitated to the art of songwriting. It has been a very wanderlust approach to finding my niche, but fell in love with many of the crafts of this art.
This album that is being created right now is a great document of where I came from yet more so, I see it as stepping stone to the next musical adventure. Sometimes I feel with the amount of time that it’s taking, that this project is supposed to be some huge life statement, or final masterpiece or something greater than it really is. In reality, I just had a lot of life packed in between all the notes being recorded. I’m excited and proud of this project, and am ready for it’s release. Although, because of the amount of work involved, I don’t think it’s so odd to say that I’m not really releasing an album, it’s releasing me.
It’s a crazy, messy drug; creating music. I’m beyond addicted.
Read MoreSea of Toms
Not only does Al make this kit sound stellar, they look pretty cool just sitting around in the room.
Birdseye View
Most of the mic's used for the sessions were Shures: KSM 32's for overheads, 137's on toms, Beta 52 for the kick, and of course a 57 on the snare. We also used the DW Moon mic for the outside of the kick drum for extra "oomph!" In addition to those, we used a variety of mics for ambients, most of the time those were KSM 27's.
Recording Drums
Most of the drum tracks recorded on the album were done by Al Berven, using this DW kit.