A Day in the Studio - Part 2

The tale of studio recording continues...

So, in Part 1 of our studio adventure, we laid down the percussion and rhythm tracks for our new single, "Ride a Rocket," and ate bug-infested snacks. After getting that foundation in place, it was time for vocals!

Yay! Singing!

I sing lead on this song, so I was up first:

The vocal room is pretty fancy, as you can see. Don't let the boxes and stuff fool you - the acoustics are great! And what's really fun is that if you look around, you find snippets of lyrics from other folks who have recorded in there. I thought about writing something really quick just so I could leave it behind for the next band. But I had to do my part and clear out so Joe could do backing vocals.

I snapped this shot through the crack in the door.
I didn't want to distract the harmonizing master at work! 

After Joe did his thang, Johnny took a shot at adding some more harmonies.

We don't use auto-tuning or any such digital trickery (though there are times we wouldn't mind it!), but we did try some of this spray to clear out some of the allergy crap from our throats before we took on the mic:

I can't honestly say if it helped, but it didn't hurt. It had a pretty strong flavor with just one squirt, so I like to think it did something. The instructions say not to use more than 20 sprays in a day. If you're using that much, you should probably just go straight to the source and suck directly on lemons. (Sidenote: We actually did that for choir and solo & ensemble competitions when I was in high school. I have no idea if it was good or bad for my vocal chords, but it worked! Lemons = Mucous Be Gone.)

After we got the vocals down, it was time to put the icing on the cake - adding all the little interesting parts that make it a produced piece instead of a live piece. This is where it gets fun, because you can add all kinds of extras that really flesh out the song - flourishes, accents, extra layers of guitars, etc. These are things we won't be able to play live, but they give the produced song real character and fullness. Your creative juices get going, and it's just plain fun to try things and see what works!

Johnny and Rob working out some guitar parts.

Joe contributing "rest."

Joe contributing "rest" in a new spot.

We'll continue to add accent parts over the next few weeks as we listen to the initial mix and see what we hear. After we've gotten all parts that we want recorded, Rob will mix everything - making this louder and that softer and putting some reverb on this and maybe taking that out completely. When he's gotten it all juuuuuuuust right, he'll master it, and folks - we will have a song!

We're already excited to hear the final product. Even without the final arrangement or mix, it sounds great, and we're learning a lot. Honestly, it's getting us antsy to start the rest of the new album, though we know there's still much to do before we can get rolling on that. But it's definitely fun to be making music and looking ahead to what we'll do with the rest of our songs.

We'll be working with our friends at Rocket Electrics on some ideas for sharing "Ride a Rocket" once it's done and ready for distribution, so stay tuned! Fun things are a-happenin'!