April 18th 2010- Day 1: Delusions of Grandeur

So Sunday was the first session with the Eclectix and things went less smoothly than we had hoped. I'm still confident we can make it work, but we all realized we have to change our approach a little bit. Recording with Discount Cinema is a very digital process, in which we use the technology we're using helps us create the best sounding product possible. However, the Eclectix are an old school rock and roll band. They use real vintage amps, and their music is reminiscent of 70's garage rock like The Stooges, MC5 and modern garage revivalists like the White Stripes. Recording them requires recreating that kind of raw, live sound you hear on those old records.

That means mic-ing the amps, and aiming for as close to a live recording as possible. Of course this is a challenge considering we don't have a studio proper, so we had a lot of issues on day one. We first tried recording a "scratch" track that everyone could later dub over, using a couple of room mics and an 8track mixer. The problem with that was we lost a lot of definition of the sound, and it obscured the beat in a lot of places. After that we tried just playing to a click track, but that made things too mechanical and we would have had to sacrifice some cool tempo shifts for only a slightly better quality recording.

At the end of the day, we realized we have to capture the band playing together live in as high of quality as possible, and then we may be able to dub new parts in over that. So, hopefully that will work and we can get on to the fun stuff. (Mixing and mastering).

Greetings One and All!

Starting this month, I will be recording and "producing" a demo for The Ecliectix, a great young band out of Denver. They have a really amazing Pixies meets White Stripes kind of feel. Anyway, over the course of recording and mixing the album I will be updating this page daily, and will discuss my experiences as an amateur producer/studio engineer. This should be a fun experminet!