Saturday, September 22, 2007

Most of you, I'm sure, have never seen Erypsus Studios. Neither have I, until today (which is strange, since I've known Clay for about 13 years and now live with him). So what more appropriate opening for the Suspyre blog than to share the awesomeness of this place with all of you?



My attention divided the instant I walked up the flight of stairs into the studio. My ears moved to the right, where Jeff was recording a drum part for the new album. Normally, all of my attention would be on that stimulus, but it's difficult to move my eyes from the wall of beautiful guitars hanging right in front of me. Even as I sit to the side writing this, I'm still glancing up at them. Personal favorites: the transparent blue PRS and the semi-hollow body Gibson. It's also tough to miss the sax lying in front of the guitars. You might remember that one from "The Breath of Gloria."



After standing in the same spot for probably seven or eight minutes, staring and listening, I headed over to the control area. Gregg has the greatest wide-screen monitor, perfect for recording purposes. I commented as such, and he replied, "Yeah, I can't wait to get a bigger desk so we can put the second monitor next to it." Yes, they're going to have a monitor roughly three and a half feet long. Mere mortals do not need this much screen space; Suspyre, however, does.

This is my favorite scene in the studio, at least from a whimsical standpoint. Gregg: "The energy drinks are from this high school band that comes in here every Friday night...they're not used to staying up past 11." He also mentions that he had thrown out all the garbage, bottles, and cans earlier this week. So you can imagine how much time is spent up in this space.

The best part of this whole trip, though, is getting to hear parts of the new album. I gotta say, the guitar riffs are freakin' killer. Jeff is inhuman on the drums, especially to the lay person's ears. He'll do a take, and then say he has to do it over again, even though it sounds perfect to the untrained ear.

Rich just showed up, so we're only minus Andrew right now. Clay is streaming the video onto Yahoo Messenger. All the sudden, this is sounding a lot more like a diary than a blog entry.

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Thursday, September 13, 2007

As some of you know, we started recording the third album last weekend. The music is so difficult; gladly we'll all patient and hard-working or else we'd get frustrated easily. Jeff will be in the studio Friday until Sunday to do some more. We predict all the drum tracks to be done by the end of the month. Then we have to finish guitars, do vocals, then all the orchestral stuff, EWI and saxophones, possibly keyboards (still unconfirmed), and then finishing touches. I'm hoping it's done by the end of the year.
Just keeping everyone updated...
-Gregg