Would-be Supermom's Procrastination Central: Band Practice: Recording

Had an *awesome* band practice tonight.

We haven't been performing since about mid-February, but the timing of this break has worked out perfectly to record our CD, since Bob and I have been on a songwriting spree. We had been playing about 7 of our own songs along with all of our classic rock and blues covers as a band at our gigs, but Bob and I have written about 13 more songs in addition to those, and have been working on them a bit, and were ready to start recording them (along with the 7 we have been playing) with the band. So that's what we've been doing with our Wednesday nights since the end of February.

My plan was to write in here about each song as we finished it, to post something about the circumstances under which it was written, etc., and also provide a link to that song. But we've been continuing to tweak each one, so we don't really have any of them totally ready yet. And I'm getting tired of not writing about them, because I'm so excited about it all!

The recording process is something that was completely new to me. Bob and I got a recorder off of eBay, and fortunately our drummer, Mike, had a good mixing program on his computer. (I guess you can do the mixing right on the recorder, but then you'd have to completely finish each song before you started the next one, and as I said, we've been continuing to edit and redo parts all along.)

The first step is to record a scrap track for the song we're going to work on. It's a track that doesn't have to be perfect (once you get enough of the real parts down, you "scrap" it), but it does have to be perfectly in time. We found it works best if it's just Mike's drums, Bob's guitar, and my singing, but all together on one track. Once we have that down, Mike re-records his drums as an isolated track, while listening (and keeping time with) the scrap track. Then Bob usually lays down the rhythm guitar part (again, on his own isolated track, but while listening to the scrap track). At that point, either Ryan (our bass player) or Sue (our keyboardist) will lay down their parts, again separately and again while listening to the scrap track. Usually I do my vocals last, and I do not do it while listening to the scrap track because it would throw me off to sing along to my own voice. But it doesn't matter, because we have all the parts recorded separately by then anyway, so I just listen and sing to that. In fact, sometimes I've done my vocals earlier on, with just the rhythm guitar and drum tracks down, which also works just fine. Oh yeah, and somewhere along the line Bob records his guitar solo parts.

Then Mike transfers all of the separate tracks to his laptop, and gets to work on mixing them to get the right levels, which is quite tricky. There are several tricky things about this, but one of them is that he might get it mixed in a way that it sounds just right on his stereo, but then when we play it back on someone else's stereo the bass is too booming or the vocals are muffled etc. etc. So it takes a long time and a lot of experimenting to get it just right.

We have recorded 5 almost complete songs at this point: Don't Go Lookin' For Trouble, Why, Bad Girl, Mental Health Day, and I Land on My Feet. The first four of those are part of our regular set list, and we've played them out at gigs many times. The last one we've never played out but had gone over it a few times in practice--we just hadn't yet gotten around to polishing it.

Tonight we started on the first brand new song. It's called "Been a Long Time, Baby". It was one of those songs that practically wrote itself--it's almost like it showed up in my mind as a song I already knew. Music and lyrics. I was hearing it as a rock song in the vein of The Doors. We hadn't worked it up yet with the guitar, though we'd been talking about it, and had even been listening to some Doors so that Bob could start to get a feel for the kind of sound I was talking about. Well, he was taking a nap one day next to me and must have been dreaming about the song or something because out of the blue (almost seemingly without waking up) he asked me what I would think about making it a reggae song. I loved it!

I have more that I've written already about how the song was written, but I'll post that later, when the song is ready. I really just wanted to write about the great feeling I had tonight, down in our neighbors' basement (where we practice), hearing this song come to life. This song that I've had in my head since last July (it first came to me when I was on a boat ride on a lake in New Hampshire)... now here it was no longer just inside of my head, but all around me, being played by these really, really good musicians, and sounding awesome! If I do say so! It came together so quickly; we were able to have everyone learn it and lay down the scrap track just like that. Bob was totally grooving on his guitar, and everyone else was sounding so good, and it just made me so happy. It really was quite the high. I can't wait until all these songs are really done!

So, if the baby keeps hanging in there through next week, we should get all the individual tracks for this song done next Wednesday evening. After that, I'm pretty sure the baby will be born, and they'll go on recording without me for at least several weeks, working on the songs that Bob sings and that I have only minimal parts on that can be added later. I'm pretty happy that it looks like we will have gotten 6 songs that I sing done before I take my baby break. Bob has at least 4 more that are ready to go, and that will be enough for an album, even though we still have 10 more on top of those....

Here are some pics I took tonight: