Spent most of the day Friday in the studio working on tracks for the orange is in CD, “Another Lame Semi-Tragedy.” Amy was in all day working on violin tracking and it was sounding great.
It’s amazing how much the violin is a part of the overall sound of the band. When you don’t hear it, you don’t think about it as much. But, when it is there…
Our goal Friday was to lay down scratch tracks for the songs so that Amy would be prepared for when we go back to Sugar Hill. We want to record the violin there because they get such a good sound on violin.
Some instruments, like drums, really require the right space for recording. Often, the larger and better sounding the room, the better loud acoustic instruments like drums sound.
With violin, it is as much about the equipment you use and the expertise you have as it is about the space. Chris gets tremendous sounds in his room, but there’s a reason some equipment is much more expensive and having that at our disposal for an instrument like violin is key.
For us, violin is like a second singer in the band. It has to have its own space and it isn’t easy to blend it into a rock band. So, the treatment for it has to be a little different than for other instruments.
We should finish guitars and (fingers crossed) acoustic guitars by next weekend. George starts on vocals this week and the idea is to get the tracks done for about half the songs by the first mixdown dates the first couple days of October.
We then have two weeks before we come back for the final three days of mixdown, so that will give us time to finish up the remaining tracks.
We are sticking to the straight ahead rock tracks for the first couple of mixdown days. We’ll have to have all the violin done by then, but we’ll need time for vocals and guitar as well as maybe some other secondary instruments like keyboard and hand percussion for the remaining songs.
I’m actually pretty excited about the way this is sounding. It is really coming together.