Recording Update July22

Joe’s rhythm guitar tracks are completed for all 8 songs on “Crowe Valley Blues”.

We went with SM57s – one close on the bottom left speaker, and one in-between the top two speakers with a little distance. Bottom 57 is going through the Avalon, top 57 is going through the Great River. We tried using the Beta52 on the top, but it just wasn’t sounding right. It seems you just can’t beat an SM57 for this type of guitar sound.

Two passes were made for a total of 4 tracks that can placed in tasty spatial layers. With the faders pushed up, this thing already sounds bigger and tighter than “Left Hand Man”. Joe has a couple more sessions left: a pass for solos and melody lines, and a pass for feedback and delay FX. Then Tomasz is up.

We do plan on trying some interesting sound collages on this album, but nothing that pulls the listener out of the experience. Hopefully we’re adding just enough to enhance what’s here, and show a little progression from LHM. The songs are already moving in a slightly different direction. It’s still Venomin James – but an older and wiser collection of songs. It looks like the running time will be about 15 minutes longer than LHM.

More to love, right?

Recording Update July15

So, now we’re finished with the drums and bass tracks for all 8 songs on “Crowe Valley Blues”.

Everything’s pretty tight. We tried a few new things that we didn’t do last time around, such as using a bottom mic on the snare and centering the overheads for a better stereo image of the drumkit. We also tracked the rack and floor this time. Needless to say, there’s a lot more to work with in the mix. The drums will sound a lot bigger this time around, keeping pretty close to our live sound.

As for bass, it’ll be a blend of 4 sources: DI from the SVT head, an SM52 mic centered between the 4×10 and 1×15, a line from the V-Twin pedal, and a clean signal from the SansAmp. We’ll just mix in and out of the sounds we need for any particular track. Right now, it sounds pretty raunchy and low.

We also finally upgraded to ProTools LE 7.1 and added 1.5GB of RAM to the machine. We haven’t noticed any major advantages yet, but I read that the audio engine is much better than 6.x.

This weekend we start the guitar tracking. Looking forward to hearing these songs come together. We’re all pretty amped on the results already.

We’re also talking more about that E.P. of covers. I can’t wait to break the news on that. So far, the choices are very, very interesting and unexpected.