Tracking session: day 1

The first day of a recording session is always the toughest. We set up the drums(a nice old Ludwig set with a 5x14 "black beauty" snare) in the tracking room where Mr. T worked furiously for a number of hours testing several different microphones in order to capture the full ambience of the room. The drumming on the record will be fairly simple with me handling the drum duties but the real challenge is getting the sound right, T ended up using his trademark distance micing technique and truly nailed the sound i was after.

Instead of using session musicians i chose to enlist the talents of few selected friends to help out on the record. The bass player "Mike" is a seasoned rock&roll professional who has performed with bands like Primus and Against All Odds and is also an enourmously talented guitarist with solid skills in all genres of music. Mike brought in a really nice bass amplifier, a "flip top" late 60's Ampeg B-15R, after a bit of tweaking and replacing the tubes Mr. T got behind the desk in the control room and announced that we could start tracking.

We decided to work on two songs with a similar feel that first day, a waltzy track called "Josephine" and a 6/8 song with the working title "12 red roses". Mike quickly got in the groove and we layed down a solid foundation for both tunes. The great thing with working with such talents like Mike and T is that you have to think less, without saying anything Mike will accentuate the right parts of the song and T will enhance the track where a bit of studio magic is needed.

It was a long but triumphant day of recording and we will move on fleshing these arrangements with various instruments in the next session. I think you will be surprised by the special guest who i will be working with next.

In order to have the right focus, you must focus right

Before I go in to the details of the recording process I would like to shed some light in to the often romanticized world of songwriting. Great songwriters like Bob Dylan, Rivers Cuomo and Jari Kuusisto all have gone to great lengths following their inner muse and landed to similar methods of crafting a song.

Not unlike these world reknowned artists I have also, sometimes desperately, struggled with that muse, totally immersing myself in to self-analysis and reflection in order to reach a higher level of depth and consistency in my art. I tried everything from meditation to recreational drugs until i by trial and error stumbled upon the same exact method these all time greats have used for decades.

Bob Dylan wrote:

"It's like a ghost is writing the song l. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don't know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song."

What Robert is trying to say here is that you can't force or overthink the process. The song will come to you. Most of the songwriting work is subliminal, the less you think the greater will the outcome be. These days when i retreat to my workroom i have no prescribed idea of what i will be working on, instead of woodshedding on some skeletal fragment of an existing tune i go straight ahead and write a new one.

In this newfound creative state i quickly demoed about 250 songs during a year with my trusty Tascam 2488 mk2(nothing fancy, just something i set up in my workroom for quick sketches). On a good day i was able to complete 20 full song ideas in a day with the tunes just flowing through me. Some of these songs like "Josephine" and "I totally understand pt. 1 and pt.2" will most likely be on the album.

A brief recap of the events leading to the creation of this blog

After playing in a couple of extremely mediocre rock bands(making a decent amount of cash) and starting a total mess of a girl-fronted indie band(losing a decent amount of cash) I thought my career as a recording musician needed a change in direction.

I took the approx. 80-100 songs I wrote for the aforementioned disasterous girl group and decided that at this stage of my artistic development the time was right to release a proper solo album. I played a couple demo versions of these new compositions to an acclaimed songwriter-friend of mine(who was 100% mesmerized by them) and he suggested that i ship these rough demo's to some producer guy named Jonas(name changed).

While flattered by his response i was very skeptical of the idea of working with an outside producer in this particular session and after reviewing Jonas's body of work my skepticism grew stronger, I decided to leave him outside the project. A couple of other up and coming producers showed interest in the material but i decided that in order to truly capture the soundscapes i had envisioned for the album i needed to have 100% artistic freedom.

I contacted a recording engineer/sound designer called Mr. T(name changed) and we started the painstaking process of converting my apartment into a full-fledged recording studio. After shelving out a ridiculous heap of cash(estimates between 20.000-30.000 dollars, not including the fees of Mr. T) and a couple of false starts we have now entered the tracking phase for the record. Our goal is nothing more than creating a work of mystical perfection, "a grandiose theme album of epic proportions" as an article in the the local media descibed it.

In this blog i will document these recording sessions and offer some insight into the creative process of my magnum opus. The rest is history, yet to be written...