90% of Tracking Finished

Hi!

It's the week following Lollapalooza weekend, and while most of my friends are raving about The Strokes reunion performance or how "The Suburbs" makes more sense live, I'm currently raving about my weekend of tracking. Here's how it went down.

Saturday / Day 1:

Dan and I built "Somewhere a Home" from the ground up.

While I laid down the other songs' basic tracks at Jonah's in Albany, I wanted to save this one to work on with Dan. It's such a neat ballad, and the ballads he arranges for his own projects are pretty dern bombastic, and I wanted to take advantage of that.

The song is driven by these ethereal, strummy acoustic guitars. It starts pretty bare bones but ends up a whirlwind of guitar, bass, drums, and piano.

Dan played drums, piano, and bass on it. I rocked everything else. Angie will of course be melodizing with her voice.

Sunday / Day 2:

We spent all of this day adding flourishes to the songs I had tracked with Jonah. Definitely getting detail-oriented, which is nice.

Friends Jonah and Alex stopped by and we all chatted about recording stuff. We finished the weekend ahead of schedule, which was awesome.

This coming weekend, Angie's taking the train in to put the final touches on tracking --her lead vocals. It's gonna be awesome. Mixing is right on the horizon. Can't fucking wait.

-Nick

Follow-up info on "The EP"

Hullo!

As of right now, Angie and I are deciding what name to release the EP under and what to title the record, so I'm just going to keep referring to it on here as The EP.

This is the tracklist (order subject to change):

1. Bites

2. X's in Squares

3. Somewhere a Home

4. The Visit

Jonah and I have already tracked "Bites" and "The Visit". "Bites" was tracked over 8 hours at a pro-studio called Carterco Recording (I'll post some of those pictures soon). The studio is in a warehouse work loft in Chicago, and has a really great vibe! The control room has a nice view of the water, and the place is dimly lit by chinaball lanterns--not so dimly lit that it interfered with playing, but dim enough that my camera's ISO couldn't go high enough =/.

From what I can remember, we used a Neumann U87 condenser mic for the vocal tracks and ran the double-tracked vocals through a reverb chamber. In PT, we ended up with both the dry and wet tracks. I ran my Telecaster ('08, BUT SOMEDAY IT WILL BE VINTAGE) through a Fender Hotrod Deluxe for all of the guitar tracks. We mic'd that, as well as the kick drum with an Electrovoice RE-20. They had this retro-ass organ which I used for a small part of the song, but upon further evaluation with Dan Smart, we're going to try and get a more agreeable tone at his place, with his multiple-organ setup. One might even call it an organ system.

Friday, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya of The Paramedics (if I hyperlinked all of his other bands, this whole post would look blue and underlined) is headed over to Albany Studios to do drums on "X's in Squares". It's probably the punkiest/nineties-est song on the album, so I'm sure he'll tear it up.

This weekend, Dan and I start tracking what's left. That'll start with "Somewhere a Home",

which we're doing from the ground up. The following day, we'll be adding pieces to the other 3

songs to make them "hit-harder"--an extra guitar line here and there, a piano overdub, backup vocals, et cetera. After that all of my hard work is done. It's all on Dan to bring a bitch to life.

Which I know he will.

NN

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Record currently blowing my mind: Maps & Atlases - Perch Patchwork

horrorscope takes/fails/successes

also starring: jOnah kOrt

july twinty-tee, millenium x 2 (+9) anno domini, albatross (we) went back into studio mode (this time with studionado jonah kort from state + madison) to record our oldest new single. horrorscope is in production and will be released in the coming weeks. meanwhile enjoy our collection of vids, pics, tricks and dicks from our experiences in studioland. our bodies is a studioland. 

WHY WONT DAN SMART EAT WITH US OR LAUGH AT OUR JOKES???

Cat Smartin [Jonas]

Today we tracked Honey Child and Marcus Aurelius. Good stuff. We're getting anxious to share them with all of you [<3].

Friday! Friday! Friday! Pictures!

Huwo Hey:

Move in. As our team predicted, at Dan's place there was a semicircle of grand pianos....

Well, maybe not grands =/.

Hi, friends and fam!/Fans!

Guys:

(For those of you who like our band but not enough to read paragraphs about our little recording shindig, I've done you the favor of highlighting the important words so you can skim through this).

Starting [this] friday, Albatross is going to start recording its first professional EP. We've been wanting to get some satisfying recordings done for some time so we're all very excited about it. And YALLS, yalls get an actual CD worthy of the poor acoustics of yalls subwoofers! Mmm, not to judge. So, I'm going to start blogging some comments and thoughts and pictures and things on the days while we're there.

Doing the producing [recording] for us is Dan Smart. You might remember him hammering out keyboard solos on Probably Vampires songs [www.myspace.com/probablyvampires]. Well, what you may not know is that he is also responsible for their fabulous debut album, Dang!. So naturally we're all jumping up and down at the chance to record with 'im.

Thats pretty much it! Hope you keep reading and following along. :-)
(Next one will likely be this friday.)

<3 Nick