12.04.2009

Studio Update #3

With Ryan finishing a little later than we had hoped, Brent had to smoke through his tracks...which he did, no problem. We took some time to set up the bass but Chris C. dialed in a tone really quickly that sounds just massive. Brent got to use the studio's bass cab which was an old cab for Minus The Bear and was used for the bass on Mastodon's Leviathan, one of my all-time favorite albums. He got a pretty thick and dirty tone out of Brent's gear that I'm stoked to hear live. He ran through most of his stuff really quickly. We used a bass distortion pedal on a couple of parts of a few songs where the bass is just by itself. It sounds so disgusting, I love it. Totally reminds me of the bass part on "Where Strides The Behemoth" on Mastodon's Remission (which, coincidentally Matt Bayles also produced). Anyway, Brent knocked out all 11 of his tracks in about six hours. I was looking at Thursday or Friday to start, but that quickly turned into Wednesday.

Wednesday began with us setting up the guitar sounds. We used my Peavey 6505+ and my Mesa cab along with the studio's Diezel head and Marshall cab. The Diezel is this monster of a head that runs around $4,500. The Marshall cab that we used was given to Mastodon when they were recording Blood Mountain. Apparently Marshall just shipped a bunch of cabs to them so they would use them on the album and when they were done with them, Mastodon gave one of them to The Red Room. The one they kept was the one that was used on all of the guitar tracks on that album. I'm really stoked to have some of that gear on our record too!

We got going at around 1 or so. I wanted to knock out as many as I could but we had a bit of limited time. I ended up getting seven finished in the first day. I never really got too frustrated. I want this to be as good as I can make it so I did things over and over until I was happy. Chris C. is really good with the click and timing, so he stopped me whenever he heard a bit of lag or rush with the click. It was such a long and draining day, and the next day would prove to be as well. Here's the board after day 6:

When I got there on Thursday a few minutes late, but we got right into it and I began to finish the last four songs. They were definitely the more challenging songs for me so these four took just about as much time as the other seven. There were certain small parts that I just couldn't lock down for some reason and I'd be redoing them again and again. A lot of work for just a few seconds. As soon as I was finished with the basic tracks we moved onto the lead parts. Most of the leads are really short and easy to do, so I got most of them too. Chris showed up around 6 to get started on his parts. He started tuning his guitar and something was just wrong. Chris C. decided to try to intonate it himself, but he discovered the neck on the guitar was slightly bowed, keeping it out of tune no matter what he does. If he tunes it to one spot on the neck, another part goes out of tune. After a while of trying to get it set up we just decided to use my guitar again. Chris isn't used to the thinner strings that I use, but he was just going to have to deal with it to avoid the tuning issues his guitar has. Once he got rolling with my guitar he knocked out three songs before we went home.

I'm having problems getting some video editing software installed on my computer so I apologize for the lack of promised video updates. As soon as I can get something working I will get to work on them!

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