Studio Journal: Cherry Bomb

Friday July 1st, 2005
We've officially cracked the seal on the commencement of the recording of our next album. I have a tentative title which I'm trying to convince the other fellers of, but I'll save it for now.
7:30pm was to be our official start time, but we waited to set up a bit cus this dude jim roder was coming down to do a little interview. he's an independent filmmaker who was out in santa fe for awhile. I met him about ten years ago I guess when he still lived in town. he had this batch of songs he was recording at an old studio I used to work at. I can't remember how any of 'em go right now, but I remember he was always cool to work with. It was different sounding and definitely his own thing. anyways, he showed up with jerry from WAIF 88.3's kindred sanction. Man, that guy's great. he's been doing that local music show for so fucking long. he tells stories about people as if we're all in the same boat, but he knows so much about local music and the family trees of bands... I don't know, half the time I can't even keep up cus he's way before my time... always a pleasure though...
right, so those guys came down and we did a couple songs live for this film that mr. roder is making, and then we answered some of his questions and then they packed up their gear and left. Then the work started.
We tore down everything we had set up and put rick's drums back together, then moved all the guitar and bass cabinets out into a different room. that way they wouldn't bleed too much on the drum room mics.
I put all the microphones in place and ran a bunch of wires all over the floors, then set up the headphone system and went back to the control room to bring up tones. I was psyched because I had gotten a new shure sm7 and I wanted to try it on the front of the kick drum, but it ended up sounding kind of shitty. we took some time on the snare drum, even trying different drums and didfferent heads until finally settling on that pretty green one the captain has. all in all, I ended up with fifteen basic tracks. kick, front of kick, two top snare mics, rack tom, floor tom, two overheads, two drum room mics, a bass direct and a bass cabinet mic, and four guitar mics on the two different 4x12 cabinets all bussed to two separate tracks for one full stereo pass of guitar. scratch vocals took up a track as well... almost forgot about that.
I think we're all pretty happy with the drum sounds. we only cut two songs ("ask the dust" and "crest nursing"), and we might do them again tomorrow, but the real goal was just to get loaded in and set up and get the sounds, so I think we've at least accomplished that much. we'll meet again at 10am saturday morning and really start plowing through the songs. This record is going to be a straight forward rock album.. no filler and no sparkle... just try and make it sound loud like a live show.
more to come as it comes to us.

goodnight.

3:05 am

-Mike