there’s a lot to be done to get ready for the recording dates. mostly travis and i have been working out final (or at least more final) arrangements of the songs through email and most of them are about there i think. there are i think 2 more at this point that we’re still going back and forth on but after that we should be good to go. i also spent a fair amount of time yesterday just getting organized. in one extremely nerdy move i built a spreadsheet to track details of all the songs and where we are on each one, mostly for my own sake. travis said it’s not uncommon to see those in-studio as well just so we all know exactly where every song is. so once i finished that i felt a lot better about things — one, because i’m a pretty organized person, two because my memory sucks, and three so i know where to go next.

so the biggest job for me beforehand that i’ve been working on is guide tracks. for the layperson, it’s just a version of the song with only acoustic and vocals, set to a click track at the right tempo, so that the other musicians can have something to practice with beforehand and hear when they’re laying down their first tracks. so since we’re on a budget and don’t have a lot of time in the studio, i’m doing these at home. i spent most of yesterday and this morning working on guitar parts and have most of them done now. i still have to do vocals, but….you can’t just do vocals first thing in the morning, or at least i can’t. gotta let the old voice warm up a bit first.

so anyway that’s what’s going on right now. i still cant’ believe that it’s actually this month that we’re going to start this thing. i don’t think my brain has completely come to terms with that yet.