Yes, mayhem

It looks like I’ve got a few good drum tracks now.  We’ve not finished tracking drums – in fact, we’re a little less than halfway finished, but I’m at a point where I can start adding in more instruments.

Bass is the next step in the process.  I haven’t really thought much about the bass because it’s kind of second nature to me at this point.  I’ve had to adjust some things slightly to key off things Kevin is playing, but for the most part, I’ve been able to record bass tracks in a single take.  In the couple of cases where I haven’t just sat down and played the bass parts, I cheat for the sake of speed.  I’ll record two tracks of bass and alternate between the two.  I’ll play the verses on one track, then the choruses on the other.  They edit together seamlessly, and its way faster to do it that way when you need to re-record parts.  I don’t like doing major editing to the tracks to accomodate a punch in, so this way works pretty well.  I’ve only done it on two songs so far, because I kept messing up one part, and I didn’t feel like redoing the entire track.

Now, it’s time for guitars.  My primary rhythm guitarist is a fellow by the name of Grant Henry.  There’s a very good chance that anyone reading this already knows who he is, and has wound up here by way of his Metroid Metal project.  I’ve managed a small amount of internet fame as a direct result of riding his coattails as the bass player on many of those songs, and I also get to play in his full live band for MM.  Anyone who has heard his solo stuff as Stemage knows that he doesn’t actually *need* me, so I feel fortunate to be included.  Grant and I have known or at least known of each other for over a decade now, as we were both part of the same music scene.  We’ve done quite a bit of over-the-internet collaboration, and he’s asked me to send him stuff to play on, so he was way high on the list when I was putting together this project.  He’s a fantastic musician, and one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet.  That’s lucky for me, because I’m hanging a lot of the weight of this album on him.

He’s always given me a lot of leeway in what I can do with the tracks he’s asked me to play on, so I’m giving him the same freedom – but, I also want him to work in my original guitar ideas since many of these songs started as a guitar part, and I want to preserve the kernal that sparked the whole thing.  I can’t wait to see what he’s able to do, because I’ve had to deal with listening to my guitar playing on these songs for years.  So, to get him up to speed on what I’m doing and how I’m doing it, I’ve made some instructional videos for him.  When we were learning the parts for Metroid Metal Live, he made videos for me as well as the other guitarists.   These were incredibly helpful, so I’m returning the favor.  I’ll upload the videos to YouTube and he can refer to them at his leisure.  Sorry, but they’re shared privately at the moment.  Maybe they’ll be included on the “making of” DVD*.

I’m thinking of calling the album “Holy Crap, I Love the Internet.”

*no, I’m not actually making a DVD

I want to write a bit about working titles.  All of my songs have working titles, because I have to name the directories on my computer *something* to keep them organized.  This is a list of the working titles for each of the songs I’ve selected for this album:

• brutal
• 32305
• brainscrape
• neater gunn
• take2
• concrete flea
• 0926-2
• reliable
• 1005
• tesselating
• victim

This list is subject to change.  Specifically, this list is subject to be increased.  So far, this process is going well, and I’m encouraged by that to add more songs.  Also, I’d like the total running time of the album to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 minutes, and with the tightening I’m doing with some of the song structures combined with a tendency to play these a little faster than the original demos, the songs are ending up shorter than I’d originally thought.  I am not upset by this.

Now, it may be clear that my naming convention is, well, nonexistent.  Some of the titles are pretty unimaginitive (“brutal” “take2″), some refer to the date they were written (“1005″, “0926-2″ (I had two separate ideas that day), “032305″), but some are personal inside jokes that are apropos of nothing.

“Reliable” is so named because before it was a full blown song, the bass solo in the middle is something I’d always tend to default to when just playing around – it was my ‘old reliable’ lick I’d come back to when I couldn’t think of anything else to play.

“Concrete Flea” got named when I visited my parents during the time I was recording the demo.  Their dog had a special place he would lie outside by the sidewalk.  He got fleas, and the concrete was covered with them, and they got on me, and so that was on my mind.

“Victim” was named because I was prevented from recording that demo because someone kept calling me asking me to fix their computer, and ‘victim’ is how I felt.

Now that I think about it, maybe “inside joke” isn’t the right term, because none of those things are very funny.  “Inside boring story” is probably better.  The other songs are named for equally pointless and boring reasons.  The only reason I even mention all this is because people ask me a lot what the names mean.  My music is instrumental, so there aren’t any lyrics to explain anything, and the names are all mysterious.  Well, now you know – they don’t mean anything.

That said, when a song of mine gets lyrics (from an outside 3rd party – usually by my friend, James), it also gets a real name, like Pinocchio.  I guess that makes James the Blue Fairy, but I digress.  “Brutal” is now called “Release,” “brainscrape” is now called “Sunday Best,” and “neater gunn” is now called “Neatomatter.”  “0926-2″ is now called “926″ because due to an amazing coincidence, it’s also our work hours (nine to six), and he wrote about how much he doesn’t like working, a theme common in his lyrics.

When/if other songs get lyrics, their names will then be derived from those, and the working titles will be left behind like little appendixes – vestigial and useless.  That’s the main reason why I don’t spend a whole lot of time on working titles.

I bought an SM57 today so I can do that thing I said I wished I could do in the previous post.  I’m going to have to get creative with my mic stands, because I only have  a clip (a borrowed clamp-style shock mount, actually) that’ll fit one of those condensers for the overheads.

I am not above using duct tape.

I wanted to make a Biblical reference here about building your house upon the rock, but there’s nothing like a little blasphemy to really work the jinx.  It’s an apt metaphor though, because the more solid your foundation, the more stable everything you pile on top will be.  In the case of  most of these songs, the foundation is the drums.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve played with some really amazing drummers.  Kevin Lawrence is going to be handling the drums on this album.

Kevin has been playing drums since he was 3, though I imagine he was beating on the rails of his crib in perfect 4/4 time prior to that.  His parents are both musicians, so he grew up in an environment that fostered his gift, and it shows.  We’ve played together for years now, and I’m still amazed at the things he’s able to do, and the relative ease with which he does them.  I am very glad he’s a part of this project.

We’ve been practicing the songs live, to get the feel right, and we’ve started tracking drums.  So far, we’ve just done some preliminary recording tests to see how everything is going to sound.  I’m a little limited in what I’m able to do based on the equipment I have at my disposal, but I’m making do with what I have.  Frankly, I’m not sure I have the skill to handle much more than what I have anyway.

The heart of my drum recording setup is a Fostex MR-8HD I’ve borrowed from my friend, James.  I’m able to record 4 simultaneous tracks with this, and the sound quality is very good, all things considered.  I’m using a couple of Nady CM90s as overheads, a Nady SCM800 on the snare, and a Realistic dynamic mic on the kick drum.  I’ve experimented the most with the kick.  I normally put the mic inside the kick drum, pointed towards the beater pad, but I think I like how it’s sounding when I move the mic out of the drum about a foot away, pointed back through the sound hole towards the beater pad.  I’m getting a little more of the breathy “poom” sound of the kick.  I was just getting the “thud” with the mic inside the drum.

Hooray for onomatopoeia!!

I was a little concerned initially about using a condenser mic on the snare, but I didn’t have a whole lot of choice, as that’s all I have.  I tried to borrow a Shure SM57, but my personal music store, James, had fried his on a previous misadventure with phantom power.  Apparently you plug in dynamic mics *before* you turn on the phantom power.  The scm800 has performed pretty well, though it still comes close to pegging the meter on the recorder, even with the gain turned all the way down.  The sound I’m getting is pretty good, so I’m just rolling with it.

If I had another mic to use on the snare, I’d use the scm800s as overheads, because that seems to be where the bulk of my sound is coming from – the overheads.  I’m using the kick and snare mics to isolate and shape the sounds of those two drums, so not much else comes from them once I start using the eq after the fact.

Right now, we haven’t done any “final” takes of any of the songs.  We’re still testing.  Here are a couple of work in progress test recordings.

Reliable – You can hear me playing guitar in the background – bleeding through the overheads.  Again, we knew these weren’t going to be usable takes, so I just played along.  When Kevin is tracking, he does it solo – without a click track even.   It’s frightening, really.  This is from our first night of recording with the MR-8HD.

032305 – This is a song that’s not yet finished, and we were just looping a couple of parts for practice, and to learn what’s currently there.  Also, the part Kevin is playing doesn’t actually work with the bass line I’ve got written for this, so it’s going to need to be changed.  I’m preserving it here because it’s ridiculous in its awesomeness.  This is from our second session with the MR-8HD.

Preproduction probably officially started several years ago when I first started writing and demoing these songs.  For this context, preproduction started sometime in late 2008.  I had been in a band that came to an end, and I was working on another project – Metroid Metal Live – that seemed like it would be a one-time event.  (That’s turned out to not be true, but more on that at another time).  I wanted to have something lined up to take advantage of the momentum from the Metroid Metal Live show in January 2009, so that’s where the idea for a “solo” project originated.

There have been a number of former bandmates I’ve kept in contact with over the years, and there’s always been discussion of doing long-distance recording, but nothing ever came of it.  This seemed like a perfect fit for this, so I started talking to these guys again, and without exception, they were into it.

Through my previous band, Life on the Blue Dot, and Metroid Metal Live, I had access to an absolutely amazing drummer, Kevin Lawrence.  He was keen on having a project beyond MMLive, and I would have been a fool to turn him down.  We’d been practicing every week for MMLive, so after that, we just picked up and started practicing the songs I’d selected for this album without, if you’ll pardon the pun, missing a beat.

I’ve noticed in the past that songs improve immensely AFTER they’ve been recorded.  When you’re tracking each instrument individually, you have a chance to figure out what does and doesn’t work, and can adjust accordingly.  Sometimes you don’t notice those tiny details when you’re rocking out at full volume.  I did some basic open-room recordings with Kevin, and they’ve proven to be very useful.  For instance, this recording of Concrete Flea felt good while we were playing it, but when I listened to it later, I realized it was WAY too fast for other parts I had planned (particularly the melody) to work effectively.  So, we adjusted, and in subsequent practices we’ve worked to slow it down.

Also, listening to these recordings has reinforced my belief that I have no business playing guitar on this album.

I’ve decided to record an album. Actually, I’ve decided to record several albums, but I’m going to start with one. I am a slave to inertia though, so I’m easing myself into this. I’ve done the one-man-band thing in the past, and that usually means I only have myself to blame when things don’t turn out like I’d hoped.

This time will be different.

Basically, I’m assembling the Dan Taylor Supergroup. I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of playing with a lot of really talented musicians over the years, and this is going to be a love-letter to them in many ways. I’ll write more about each of my special guests at some point, but for now I’ll just say that they’re each selected because of what they can do, and mainly it’s what I can’t.

They complete me.

This first album is going to be a selection of “standards” – songs I’ve had for years that I felt would benefit from this sort of treatment. My hope is that by writing about the process in a public manner, I’ll accomplish two things – I’ll think a little more about what I’m doing, and I’ll be shamed into finishing the thing if I get slack.

So, this is how it’s going to be then? I guess it is.