Briskman and Briskman

Another Sunday... Another Sunday. Yeah... Still recovering a bit from our day in the studio on Thursday... and what a day it was.

We went in with the goal of getting drums done on all 5 songs... we left with that as well as a lot of usable bass and guitar. Our day began at about 10:00 am as Barret and I met Jay at I.V. Studios in Uptown... "I.V." stands for "In Vault" as the studio is in an old bank and the live room and control room are actually down in the old vault. It's pretty damn cool.

Barret began setting his drums up while Jay and I got coffee and breakfast. Once Barret was set up, Jay and our engineer George began putting microphones around the drums and room. Jeff arrived. Jeff and I went for beer. Jay, George and Barret worked through various microphone and drum configurations and by about 2:00, we were ready to actually record.

Jeff sat in the live room with Barret, I was relegated to a vocal isolation booth behind glass sliding doors. We dug in and started with the song Dark Before the Dawn. And Barret and Jeff both nailed it on the second take, with me getting a pretty good guitar take as well. Next came the poppy You Were... which we got it about 3 takes.

Aoife arrived to check in on the proceedings. After changing the drum and guitar configuration, we attacked the first rocker of the day, Bright Dark Times. Although it took us a couple more takes than the first two tunes, we still got a really strong version in fairly quick order. Satisfied with our progress, we took a dinner break and reconvened after pizza to attack Canary, the oldest song of the bunch. 

Again, within 3 runs we had a good take, and suddenly we had just one song to go. The final song was St. Scarlet, another rocker. We nailed a strong take on our first run, btu we decided to do one more just to try a couple of different things... and that second take had some outright magic in it... Barret especially took a couple of chances and the outcome was striking.

At this point, although tired, we decided to make use of some of the incredible equipment that littered the studio, and go after some guitar. Jay and I work incredibly well together, and within an hour we had reimagined St. Scarlet with soaring guitars... almost all my parts were recorded on the first take and a bunch of them we just came up with on the fly... very cool stuff.

So this week, I will attack more guitars with Jay, and then we should be in a position fairly quickly to do violin, vocals, and for Jeff to finish the bass parts. There is something so amazing about working in the studio, and I'm fairly confident that this project is going to quickly turn into something special... it already feels that way.

More soon...

jbg