The Golden Door - 2/06

Well...it's been quite a while since anyone has posted anything on here. So I'll do a little "update" on our recording process as of late.

This last week of February we had a very productive late night session where we put together a few "segues" for the record. Very incidental, non-song-like, pieces of music that are intended to serve as quick interludes between songs. I think they worked out pretty well.

One of the pieces was a guitar piece that Toby wrote a while back. He played it on his little Fender amp, with some cool tremolo, while I did a really simple rythym with just ride/kick/rim shot. Mike just needs to mix it to the appropriate level, and I think it'll be a cool addition.

The second piece we worked on was completely off the cuff. Mike wanted to have a sort of "intro" for "Ask The Dust" and suggested we play a part of the chorus in a unique way. After briefly tossing some ideas back and forth, I suggested we try to use that but stretch it out and make it a more dark, ambient, swelling, piece of noise that crescendoed into those notes he was looking for. I was really happy with the way this turned out. Mike was doing some cool ebow/feedback through his marshall head on his jazzmaster, and I did a weird ride/tom pattern on my practice kit. It's REALLY slow, spooky, and sludgy sounding til the end where Toby plays those notes on this weird dulcimer type instrument. Not sure what it's called. I think my description of this is just vague/abstract enough that you probably won't get what it sounds like til you hear it. Ha ha ha.

The last thing was another piece that Toby came up with on his acoustic guitar at home. Very cool little ditty. I suggested he try to track it in the ENORMOUS wherehouse outside the studio walls. It's just a monsterous concrete cavern, so I thought it'd give the music a killer natural reverb sound. He said he had some trouble tracking it since it was a thing he just made up on the fly one night, recorded as he thought of it, and never played it again. Not sure if we'll use it or not...we'll have to see how it get's mixed.

All in all, a very productive session. These types of things have worked out very well for us lately. We seem to come up with good ideas when we do things in a spontaneous way like this. We never used to work like this, but now having the studio I guess we can afford to try things in this way.

Fun, fun. Can't wait to hear the mixes. Now we have a little break while Mike and I head on the road with Ampline for about two weeks. Should be great.