Monday, March 8, 2010

Feeling the weight of the music.

What a great day at the studio. Every time we start a new session, we are all scattered on the first day, our late loading, our distracted minds, trying to structure the day... but once the day aligns (with the universe in our heads?), and things start to fall into place, it becomes a very focused and enjoyable process. We spent most of the morning setting up and then getting the drums ready for "Ministry of Truth". I thought we would just do that, and leave guitars for some other time, but we recorded bass, and most of the guitars. To say we are pleased with the way it is sounding, it's an understatement. But as of right now, they are just words, the real test will be when everything is done and put down as a final piece on a CD or another digital format.
We started at around 11:00 am and finished at 9:00pm and I would say about 70% of the day we spent it on the aforementioned track. No complaints.

Then we moved on to "Empty Places". At first, we thought it was going to be a pain to put the contents of the Roland MC-505 onto the computer, track by track, and I thought, oh no, we are not leaving at a decent time tonight, but once we figured out a simple way to dump it into the computer, that part went a lot more smoothly. That track, at least for me, put a very somber atmosphere in the studio. We were very pleased to listen to the drumming tracks again that we had done at Counterpoint last year. We had forgotten how good they sounded. Moving on to "The Gathering Darkness" didn't help the gloomy mood. We wanted to do some sort of marching drums, so Mitchell layered a few tracks with different snares.

Then it dawned on me.

I started feeling the weight of all the atmosphere, mood and sentiment we were putting into the music. It almost feels like a big responsibility to do it right. But how do you do it right? when you do art, it is a very abstract thing, even though you try to structure things. My only comfort is that we are doing the best we can, we are being true to ourselves and our music. As for the rest and how people react to it, I have no control. Am I being melodramatic about the whole thing? I don't know, but I think a lot about our music and what we are doing, especially during this process.

Until the next entry, beloved recording blog.

- Oliver.

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Drum Setup at Counterpoint Studios.

Drum Setup at Counterpoint Studios.
right click / View Image to see whole picture.