I should have brought my laptop down with me to Shedaluma.
Ariana Lenarsky,
http://www.myspace.com/arianalenarsky, is a girl who you might not believe sings and writes incredible music if you high fived her at a party.
Tambo met her through some random alleyway-grapevine way of friends... shortly after she asked what are rates were, followed by Tambo's nervous laughter since we usually don't charge for friends, we set a date to enter Shedaluma for a weekend.
Pre-production was pretty quick. Usually, I really like taking a good day or so to just talk some stuff out. I don't usually like just jumping into a project thinking we can solve all our later problems with time, filters, and post production techniques, so I usually like taking a day to hang out and talk out some things... what kind of feel the artist is going for, what they think they want from the session, what they don't want, what they like and don't like, if they like coffee or tea at Aroma Roasters, etcetcetc. Since Tambo was pressed for time, as was Ariana, we couldn't take that day to just hang. I assumed Tambo hung out already since it was two weeks before he took the trek up to the North Bay.
Ariana wanted to record 7 songs at this session, with no real solid intention as to which ones will make the final cut, much less no real idea where these songs will inevitably end up (since she went back to Portland after this weekend).
Since we were pressed for time, we couldn't really map out each song to the fullest extent we'd like to, so we were thrown up against this wall of mostly gray, recording guitar and vocals first. Then we'll be doing a mixture of bass, second guitar, and percussion second, and then kit drums inevitably last... this is almost 100% backwards from our usually take on recording, especially since there was no click track involved on these recordings at all (and there won't be) so recording the rest of these instruments will really be an experiment and trial by fire. Which isn't bad at all, it's just harder for the artist to put her two cents in since she's far away from us by this point and we're kind of left to do what we do best: produce the shit out of these songs.
So, without knowledge of percussion or bass, and without a direction of what we want on any song at all, Tambo and I decided to just record every single song as good as possible as if it were just her vocals, one guitar (or mandolin), and some extra vocals for some kick. Honestly though, it sounded pretty solid after those takes... almost to the point where extra stuff might just not be what we need but rather really really solid subtle stuff (solid drums, solid bass, solid perc., solid saw+bow...)
We switched back and forth between two different mics for the most part. Turns out, what I thought was a AKG C2000 was actually a Rode NT1, a similar mic by a different company.
This mic definitely is a tender mic. It was used on a whole slew of different tracks... percussions, back up vocals, gang vocals, vocalvocals... very versatile. For guitar, we stuck it out with the AKG C1000, as well as an Audio Technica mic I once again can't remember for the life of me...
We also used the C1000 for some vocal tracks, as shown here... Ariana is doing her "wtftambo" face.
As you can see from the last picture, there is a marimba within the premises. We will definitely be using that on the recordings. We're looking at a pretty full-court-press when it comes to this album. I don't think any rock will be left unturned, so to say, since there is a lot of elements in these songs that can bring to life some of the things, techniques and otherwise, that Tambo and myself have been wanting to do for awhile.
For this record, we do have an pseudoallstar line up of guests to record with... aside from Tambo on percussion/vox, and myself on guitar/bass/drums, Stephen Tamborski (www.area707.com ; yes, he's related to Ryan Tamborski) on washtub bass and electric bass, Maxi Maksutovic on piano/keyboard, and a slew of other unconfirmed but most likely possibles (we'll leave those up to your imagination for now).
We're also trying to be conscience about our tracking this time around. We've been cursed with already taking up 4 of the 8 analog tracks available to us already. Our two options, both plausable and doable, are either fill out 8 tracks, digitize them, save them, sync them, then re-record over them with newer tracks... or, maximize the amount of stuff we're doing on each track, making all percussion on one track, minimizing drums, etc. I'm a "more tracks, the better" type, so hopefully we can go forth and digitize all those tracks we've done before moving on... post-production is going to be a bitch.
Til next time!
