Erik Schau and his slew of songs

I don't know exactly when Schau started recording his demos at Shedaluma, sometime between the time he got back from his semester abroad and his next quarter at UCSB, but he brought Tambo and myself, the 402 Production team, a slew of songs that weren't exactly finished by our standards. His myspace account, www.myspace.com/erikschau, depicts a few songs as to which he has recorded and some songs we have recorded with him.

Tambo has this organic rhythm appeal towards most songs. Kind of funny coming from a beatmaker and mash up artist like himself, but it almost makes complete sense seeing as he is techincally making beats and adding more beats on top of beats for songs. We usually take a driving percussion stance on acoustic tracks to fill out the outside emptiness solo acoustic tracks sometimes bring.

On Schau's latest track, 'Julia', we opted out for a few things we haven't set forth on Schau's songs before. On his first two demo'd tracks he brought us, 'Dreams of Driftwood' and 'Most of All', we took a very simple straight forward approach to those songs and tried to maximize on backing vocals and guitars and lingered on percussion and bass. The option to leave 'Julia' bassless was actually almost a mistake since that didn't cross my mind til... now. However, we maxed out all the tracks as usual so I guess it wasn't extremely necessary to include a low tone track like that... however, testing as many waters as possible is what makes for the best sound.

For 'Julia', Schau was using his Taylor for the guitar track recording through a Shure SM57 I believe and singing through that AKG C2000 (I think it was a C2000...). For the second acoustic guitar, we opted for a baby Taylor through that same C2000 with the mic closer to the bridge than the sound hole for that deep raking acoustic sound you hear. During this recording session, my band Bare Knuckle Boxing was actually recording at the same time, so a third electric guitar was used for the solo portion of the song. That was my Ernie Ball Music Man Silhouette Special going through my original Fender Deluxe mic'd with an SM57. The delayed swell-y sounding tremlolead effect was a simple custom delay programed through my first edition Digitech RP200.

Tambo quickly learned how to play the accordion, I believe it's a toy accordion... could just be some toy version of some variant of an accordion, and tracked that going through an AKG C 414. All extra percussions were done going through the C2000 (I'm now thinking that AKG mic could very well be the larger diaphram version of the C 414... I really need to get down there and check it out).

Backing vocals went through both the C2000 and C414. I don't know if it was the mic output from the C414 or Schau's voice, but his "presence", so to say, was greater than that of Tambo's when recording these tracks. That wasn't a bad thing at all, but at the mix down it was hard to work around since cutting the level in half loses intensity of the vocals, so Tambo (he was SE for this one actually) decided to cut the losses and opted for the same intensity at the cost of weird leveling.

Tambo did leveling and pseudomastering through the board (nonautonomous...). That Mackie is the worst leveling board in the world, I've decided. It doesn't kick as much as some boards I've been behind, which makes it kind of not the most awesome workstation already. It's got a few faulty faders that make it almost impossible to do on-the-fly pans or eq's. The non-autonomous thing makes it twice as hard, if not more, to do quick leveling. We started just summing and exporting all the tracks on their own and loading them into a DAW and finishing it off there. I'm not really a fan of DAW stuff... the ability to actually touch the track is an art lost to binary code. Some things, like tape and reels, can be traded for hard drives and digital storage now... that's not a problem... but when you're recording mostly analog, there is a culture of art that seems to be mistaken for work nowadays. Thank god for companies like iZ corp.