DAY ONE: Friday, February 8, 2008
First day recording our first demo! Yesiree, things were all set: Record two songs (one original, one cover) over a period of two days in the empty house from which my family had just moved (hereafter referred to as the "HexHouse") using Tony's friend Michael's recording equipment. The master bedroom was chosen as the main studio, with my drum kit in the middle of the room, Tarzan tucked away in the computer nook, and Tony's and JT's amps set up along the opposite wall.Well, now that we had everything set up to record our two-song thingy, a dialog occurred:
"How many songs are we gonna record?"
"I thought we agreed on two!"
"Yeah, but are we really just gonna do two? I think we could do four."
"Four?"
"Totally, four."
"Alright, let's do four!"
"AIDS."
Four it is then! Two covers (Troops of Doom, Sodomy and Lust) and two originals (Toxic High, Tombs of the Blind Dead), the order being Troops, Toxic, Tombs, and Sodomy.
Well, now that we had everything set up to record our four-song thingy, we went on to the first order of business: Bass and drum tracks. The way it worked was that Tony would play along with me and Tarzan, with Michael recording all three of us. The bass and drum parts would actually be laid down while the guitar would later be discarded, serving the purpose of being a "scratch" track that Tarzan and I could follow.
So we get to work on Troops and guess what? The drummer can't play the song! I've been playing Troops of Doom since October '06, and for some reason I just cannot keep the rhythm today! After a few flubbed takes I relaxed, told myself I was just nervous about recording for the first time, got myself in the "it's just another practice" mindset that helps me not throw up all over my kit at shows, and went back to it.
This time I got it right. Yayz! Everyone celebrate! Oh noes! Our immediate celebration is caught on tape! So unless we want the sound of JT going "That was pretty damn good!" on the end of every track on the final result, we're going to have to keep quiet until Michael hits the button stopping the recording process. We christened this new rule the "Uncle Bob" Rule*. Since Troops is not a song that typically has cymbal decay, we were able to move on without doing another take.
Toxic High went rather swimmingly, Tombs came and went as well, I think we did maybe three takes max. The only problem came with how we were actually going to end it (Yes, you heard it folks, we've been playing that song for like four or five months, we even played that song live, and we didn't have an official ending!). We decided on some kind of gradual-fade-out deal that worked really well and moved on. And then came the bitch: Sodomy and Lust.
The most fill-filled song I play, not to mention one of the longest in our set list, I have to say ol' Sodomy was the hardest song in the recording process for all of us. And guess what? The bassist can't play the goddamn song! There are some parts of Sodomy that Keith just didn't know. Which is somewhat understandable, he's only been in the band a short time, so we took some time out to coach him on how the parts go, and we went at it again. Oops, Keith messed up the part before we go into the solos. Oh well, gotta give it the ol' college try, so hitch up and try again. Oops, Keith messed up again. Oops, Dart fucked up a fill. Oops, same mistake for Keith. Oops, Dart screwed up, different fill.
Tony eventually suggested getting food as it was now around 8:00 (I had been playing drums for three hours! Jesus.) So he and JT went out to What-a-Burger and Taco Bell while I did one more take with Keith, which astoundingly we got right! Well, I messed a little something up at the end, but who cares? I was just glad to be done with it! After that I sat in the kitchen with Michael and Keith, rubbing my very tired arms, trying to remember whose wise-ass idea it was to do four songs. Tony and JT got home forty-fucking-five minutes later. We pigged out and decided we still had time to take care of another order of business:
JT's guitar tracks. I would have gladly stuck around to watch him warm up, but I was helping Tony find his Zune. (A fine moment for any owner of a spiffy MP3 player: you lose track of it and can't seem to find it anywhere.) When Tony and I got back to the session room, I was surprised to find that JT was using Tony's Jackson guitar. Why? I dunno. He tried a couple takes with it; he may as well have programmed a wah pedal to say "ass" and kept it pressed down the whole time cause that's what it sounded like. Let's face it, Sweet Lady Jackson is Tony's guitar, nobody can make it sound good but him.
Sensing the same problem, Tony had JT switch over to Tony's LTD guitar, which more closely resembles JT's own Jackson in terms of pickups and string distance from the neck… or some such guitar shit. Except this one has a whammy bar, which JT's own Jackson doesn't (which, come to think of it, may have been the reason JT was using it). Anywho, he tried that a few times, and his riffing was definitely improved, but still something was off. It wasn't that his playing was bad. I've known JT eight months, from the very moment I met him he's had a guitar in his hands, so I can assuredly say that the J-Tizzle doesn't suck. We eventually surmised that he was having trouble just following the bass and drum tracks, so we decided to go ahead and greenlight…
Tony's guitar tracks. And guess what happens? On Sodomy and Lust, that totally awesome "final" take Keith and I did, I forgot to count off the beginning! And the guitar is the first instrument you hear on the song, so Tony has no idea where to start so that he'll match up with the drums and bass coming in a few seconds later, and the whole effort's shot to pooh. We say "Dammit!" and move on.
The account of the recording of Tony's rhythm tracks is pretty boring to anybody but Tony. He's been playing the cover songs much longer than JT and wrote most of the riffs to the original songs himself; laying down his rhythm tracks was nothing different from any other practice, requiring no more than two or three takes at a time. Watching him do Tombs was pretty amusing; the rhythm for the middle solo section requires Tony to play the riff twenty times, and I could not only see but feel the dude's arm getting tired. And I was starting to think "Good lord, eight bars of solo per guitarist, what were we thinking? How tedious can you get?"
His solos for these songs were something to behold: faster, crazier, more whammy-bar abused than any I've ever seen him do for these songs. In Toxic High, he even threw out the solo he'd originally written (due to a certain part he kept messing up) and made up a new one on the spot, which of course came out reeking of awesomeness. In Tombs, the lead he performed for the "long" solo section seemed to go by in an instant, and suddenly the section overall just didn't seem as long. Amazing what a good solo can do.
By the time he gets his rhythm and solo tracks laid down, it's around 10:30 or so and we decide to call it a night. Overall not a bad day at all, but one thing's for sure for the next day: We're gonna have to start all over on Sodomy and Lust.
*"Uncle Bob" Rule: In the movie "That Thing You Do!", the drummer's uncle (Bob) is recording the band's first record. After they complete a song, Uncle Bob uses the finger-to-lips indicator of "Shut the fuck up!" to keep them quiet until he hits the button a few seconds later, allowing the track to "die out" instead of just ending abruptly with the song or "dying out" with their voices in the background.
