Days Three and Four - Drum Tracking

After four days in sunny California, where the hell is our sun? Rainy, cold, we might as well be in Philadelphia – no offense.

We’re moving along with the drum tracking, changing up the sound a little bit for each song. Mostly we’re switching out the snare drums – Matt and Jeff have a collection of snares with different sounds and names to match, i.e., the Strokes Snare, the Don Henley Snare, The Beat It Snare. These names change as necessary to suit different studio personalities.

Briks is doing an excellent job pounding out the tracks, with only the mildest use of the big red studio magic button. However, we’ve run into annoying, mood killing setbacks every day. Yesterday our Avocet studio controller blew out for reasons unknown, and today a snare head broke mid song (warranting a trip to Chad Sexton’s Drum World – yes that Chad Sexton from 311). Then some A&R suits from Epic, like totally showed up for like, two hours, and, like, harshed our vibe, dude. Later our A&R from Thrive showed up with pizza, red bull, and beer, and that was cool.

Everything seems to be clicking nicely with the producers, and already ideas are being thrown around for how to improve upon and modify the tracks. We catch them humming the melodies and bass lines all the time, which is encouraging. Chris the engineer called in from the east coast where he’s working on Ben Stiller’s next movie “just to check in”. Its nice to know that everyone’s getting fired up about the record.

In other news, we may be going on a great tour immediately after recording is finished. Details soon. Also, we’re listening to lots of hip hop in the car. Also my dog, that I’ve had since I was nine, died yesterday at 16 years old. He lived a long and full dog life, but this is proving to be more upsetting than I had imagined.

Matt