with our last studio day for the moment behind us, today brought travis over to my house to sort of see where we were with everything and hear the mixes for the first time outside of the studio environment. …which is kind of scary because part of you is afraid it only sounded good out of those great big nice studio monitors and won’t sound good anywhere else. fortunately for us that was not the case. it sounded equally great on the speakers hooked up to my laptop and we were both still pleased with where things were.

so today wasn’t really too interesting — we mostly just punched some acoustic parts that we had changed arrangements on or parts that were a little shaky and needed fixing. we got rough levels on everything so far and started talking through what we wanted to add to the songs still and when we might do those things — administrative stuff for the most part. i did record shaker and a tambourine for two of the tracks today, which will effectively allow me to join rich under the title of “percussion” in the album credits. awesome, right? but then we attempted to add a bit of mandolin. neither travis or me are much of mandolin players (read: barely know a thing about it) so we chunked through it several times each and will be lucky if any of it is usable when it’s all said and done.

my homework is involving a few more shots at mandolin, an acoustic lead part for rise, and a the addition of a “nashville strung guitar” to one of the songs. this is a new concept to me — one of countless things i’ve learned so far through this experience. apparently since 12-string guitars are annoying to keep in tune (this part i know, and it’s an understatement) what a lot of guys in nashville are doing is just keeping a spare 6 string guitar that is strung only with the 6 ‘other’ strings in a 12-string pack. so if you track the regular acoustic and then you track the ‘nashville strung’ guitar next to it then wham bam you’ve got a 12-string sound with somewhat less of the hassle. plus it sounds really weird and cool. so we got a pack of 12-string strings and strung up my old black guitar. it’s pretty crazy. so i’m supposed to record that too over the next few days.

another discovery was the “jellyfish pick”. as you might have guessed this weird little guy looks like a jellyfish, with little metal prongs that you use to pick the strings and it gives it kind of a lighter more scratchy clang type of sound. it doesn’t sound good the way i’m describing it, mainly due to poor adjective choices on my part. but it sounds really cool and you can see it better in the picture i took of it below. i’m actually going to be combining that with the nashville-strung guitar for a pretty interesting sound. none of this was my idea, by the way. having an engineer is really pretty invaluable.

there are 3 more songs that we haven’t done much on that still need attention:

‘consume’ is going to be pretty much entirely an acoustic song and we talked through some arrangement ideas of that today too. we also changed the tuning from the original drop-d tuning i wrote it in to an open-d tuning that is seriously making a lot of difference in how the guitar part sounds. after i sort of relearn the song in open tuning i’ll be laying that down in the next few days.

‘questions’ is the weird acoustic song that’s got synth treatment. the acoustic part is basically done but we’re going to be turning eddie loose on it fairly soon to give it some heavy bottom end stuff and a some kind of atmosphere. i’m anxious to see what we can come up with to make that one cooler and more different from the original.

‘you are never really gone’ was written as a strummed solo acoustic song. then it changed forms into a fingerpicked slightly lower-key song. now the latest idea i had is to make it a piano-only song, which i think will be really cool. not to mention the only all-piano song on the record. so i’ve turned eddie loose on this one as well.

so what’s next? we have a couple more studio days that are likely going to be early next week or early the week after, depending on some scheduling stuff. after that we’ll spend one more day at the house finishing up stuff. over those 3 days we’ll be doing synth and keys stuff, some more electric guitar stuff, all the vocals, and all the harmonies — that is if all goes to plan. then i send it back up to nashville with travis and he starts the mixing process. then….well then we’ll be almost done!

anyway here are some more pictures to round it out. again, devoid of any order.

me in the control room, apparently happy about something. maybe that my dream is coming to life, i don’t know.

the crazy jellyfish pick i was talking about. how weird is that?

my old black guitar, strung nashville style. which, i am realizing right now, is something you cannot remotely tell in this picture.

eddie tracking keys on ‘not the end’.

bethany and i, being critical from our spot in the back of the control room.

we ran eddie through a crapload of stuff looking for cool effects.

eddie’s circle-o-keyboards.

another view from the main tracking room.

rich, travis, and sarah (studio assistant) changing drum pieces for bethany’s song.

charley tracking upright for bethany’s song.

this is the upright on the floor. again, something that seemed like it would be a good picture at the time. but obviously isn’t.

bethany is chillin.

couch in the lounge area.

much better picture of the sign.

eddie in his keyboard circle.

the giant foam cube where the bass amp was isolated.

another main room shot.

me and rich and charley. or “the artists formerly known as The Well Band”.