Tuesday, May 25, 2010

May 21st: Andrew did all his parts for SofC and I attempted to fix some of mine for TDS. I am in process of getting my guitars set up now; my Ibanez Petrucci had terrible intonation issues and a broken jack (finally got those fixed), and my Manne goes completely out of tune whenever I bend or use the tremolo, so that's being sent out tomorrow to get looked at. Hopefully next week I will be up-and-running in the guitar department and can get more of my parts tracked! We keep forgetting to get videos of these guitar sessions, but I promise we will start doing that soon.

-Gregg

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Recording day 4 (05/08/10):

Andrew and I did some guitar recording today for TDS. What I discovered: the ENGL Powerball is a lot more diverse than I thought! After I was recording some lead parts and thinking it was too grainy, we discovered how to "open focus" the mids and smooth out the tone. I think I still prefer the Mesa/Boogie clean tone (The Green Rhythm channel on the TriAxis), but I did some of my clean parts on the ENGL as well. Judging by what we did today, I have a feeling I'm going to do about 90% of the clean and 10% of the distorted parts on this album. Also, we're using three mics; an on-axis SM57, an off-axis SM57 (on the same cone), and an Audix D2 on another cone. Like with the drums, I'm probably going to wind up muting the two bonus mics except for certain passages.

I'm going to redo most of the lead parts I did today, as I was struggling with the intonation on the Ibanez Petrucci I was using. I haven't changed the strings in months, so that probably has a lot to do with it. Also, I play better in private, because I panic when in company, as I feel I have to get it done quickly so no one is waiting.

It's really exciting hearing how this song is coming out. We'll leak it once we're done with the editing and tracking the keyboards for it. Then we'll have about 8% of the album done besides final mixing and mastering!

-Gregg